On the performance, feasibility, and use of forward-secure signatures

Forward-secure signatures (FSSs) have recently received much attention from the cryptographic theory community as a potentially realistic way to mitigate many of the difficulties digital signatures face with key exposure. However, no previous works have explored the practical performance of these proposed constructions in realworld applications, nor have they compared FSS to traditional, nonforward-secure, signatures in a non-asymptotic way. We present an empirical evaluation of several FSS schemes that looks at the relative performance among different types of FSS as well as between FSS and traditional signatures. Our study provides the following contributions: first, a new methodology for comparing the performance of signature schemes, and second, a thorough examination of the practical performance of FSS. We show that for many cases the best FSS scheme has essentially identical performance to traditional schemes, and even in the worst case is only 2-4 times slower. On the other h...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Eric Cronin, Sugih Jamin, Tal Malkin, Patrick Drew McDaniel
• Keywords: CCS 2003, Forward-secure Signatures, Fss Scheme, Security Privacy, Signatures