Digital Signature Schemes [electronic resource] : General Framework and Fail-Stop Signatures / by Birgit Pfitzmann.

Requirements on digital signature schemes -- History of digital signature schemes -- Information-theoretic security for signers: Introduction -- Terminology -- Properties of digital signature schemes -- Overview of existing schemes with other than ordinary security -- Conventional definitions of fail-stop signature schemes and general reductions -- Building blocks -- Constructions for one message block -- Signing many long messages -- Lower bounds.

This book, based on the author's Ph.D. thesis, was selected during the 1995 GI Doctoral Dissertation Competition as the winning thesis in the foundations-of-informatics track. Securing integrity for digital communications in the age of global electronic information exchange and electronic commerce is vital to democratic societies and a central technical challenge for cryptologists. As core contribution to advancing the state of the art, the author develops the new class of digital fail-stop signatures. This monograph is self-contained regarding the historical background and cryptographic primitives used. For the first time, a general and sophisticated framework is introduced in which innovative fail-stop signatures are systematically presented and evaluated, from theoretical foundations to engineering aspects.