Digital signature schemes

This book is based on the author's Ph.D. thesis which was selected during the 1995 GI Doctoral Dissertation Competition as the winning thesis in the foundations-of-informatics track. Birgit Pfitzmann did her Ph.D. work at the University of Hildesheim with Professor Joachim Biskup as advisor. Securing integrity for digital communications in the age of global electronic information exchange and electronic commerce is of vital interest for democratic societies and a central technical challenge for cryptologists. As core contribution to advancing the state of the art, the author rigorously develops the new class of digital fail-stop signatures: in contrary to all previously introduced digital signature schemes, these new signatures enable the supposed signer to actually prove forging of the scheme in the case of a successful attack. This monograph is self-contained with respect to the historical background and cryptographic primitives used. For the first time, a general and sophisticated framework is introduced in which previously proposed and the innovative failstop signatures are systematically presented and evaluated, from theoretical foundations up to engineering aspects. Thus the book is compulsory reading for anybody interested in secure digital communication at the professional level.