A decentralized group signature scheme for privacy protection in a blockchain

Abstract

Group signature schemes play a vital role in protecting identity privacy of a member of a group who signs a message using the group signature. However, in the existing group signature schemes the centralized group manager has control over all the participants, and these managers can be malicious. They may take a biased decision when there is a dispute among the group members or while revealing the identity of a group member. To overcome the trust issues related to centralized group managers and to improve user privacy, a decentralized group signature scheme (DGSS) is proposed by decentralizing the role of the group manager. The proposed scheme will be more suitable for decentralized environments like a blockchain. Security analysis along with the proof of correctness is also provided for the proposed scheme. A framework for a blockchain-based e-auction protocol using the DGSS is also proposed in this paper.