Fine-grained forward-secure signature schemes without random oracles

We propose the concept of fine-grained forward-secure signature schemes. Such signature schemes not only provide non-repudiation w.r.t. past time periods the way ordinary forward-secure signature schemes do but, in addition, allow the signer to specify which signatures of the current time period remain valid when revoking the public key. This is an important advantage if the signer produces many signatures per time period as otherwise the signer would have to re-issue those signatures (and possibly re-negotiate the respective messages) with a new key. A part front a formal model for fine-grained forward-secure signature schemes, we present practical schemes and prove them secure under the strong RSA assumption only, i.e., we do not resort to the random oracle model to prove security. As a side-result, we provide an ordinary forward-secure scheme whose key-update time is significantly smaller than that of known schemes which are secure without assuming random oracles. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.