Society-oriented Designated Confirmer Signatures

The concept of society-oriented designated confirmer signatures (SDCS) is introduced in this paper. SDCS can be used in the circumstances where the capability of the signer and that of the confirmer are both needed to be shared among groups of individuals. The ways to share the signing capability and the confirming capability are different due to the different stabilities of the signer group and the confirmer group. Based on the techniques of threshold cryptography, a concrete SDCS scheme is proposed and its security is analyzed. Our scheme can also be converted into an ordinary signature scheme or a designated verifier signature scheme.