A comparative performance analysis of several blind signature schemes

In this paper we present a comparative performance analysis of nine blind signature schemes that have been proposed since 1983 until 2008, spanning a total of 25 years of active research in this topic. We give a short description of all the schemes studied and their main components. This includes customary arithmetic building blocks such as modular exponentiation, elliptic curve scalar multiplication, bilinear pairing computation and a special hash function that maps arbitrary input strings to elliptic curve points (the so-called map-to-point hash function). We developed a C language library that implements all the nine schemes selected and then conducted timing tests on a Pentium IV processor working at 2.0 GHz, which allow us to report a software performance comparison of those methods when using a cryptographic strength equivalent to 80 security bits.