Digital signature forgery
In a cryptographic digital signature or MAC system, digital signature forgery is the ability to create a pair consisting of a message, , and a signature (or MAC), , that is valid for , where has not been signed in the past by the legitimate signer. There are three types of forgery: existential, selective, and universal.[1]
Types
Besides the following attacks, there is also a total break: when adversary can compute the signer's private key and therefore forge any possible signature on any message.[2]
Existential forgery (existential unforgeability, EUF)
Existential forgery is the creation (by an adversary) of at least one message/signature pair, , where was not produced by the legitimate signer. The adversary need not have any control over ; need not have any particular meaning; the message content is irrelevant — as long as the pair, , is valid, the adversary has succeeded in constructing an existential forgery.
Existential forgery is essentially the weakest adversarial goal, therefore the strongest schemes are those that are existentially unforgeable.
Signature of a product of two messages
Take an algorithm, like RSA, with the multiplicative property:
- .
This property can be exploited sending a message with a signature .[3]
A common defense to this attack is to hash the messages before signing them.[3]
Selective forgery (selective unforgeability, SUF)
Selective forgery is the creation (by an adversary) of a message/signature pair where has been chosen by the challenger prior to the attack.[4] may be chosen to have interesting mathematical properties with respect to the signature algorithm; however, in selective forgery, must be fixed before the start of the attack.
The ability to successfully conduct a selective forgery attack implies the ability to successfully conduct an existential forgery attack.
Universal forgery (universal unforgeability, UUF)
Universal forgery is the creation (by an adversary) of a valid signature, , for any given message, . An adversary capable of universal forgery is able to sign messages he chose himself (as in selective forgery), messages chosen at random, or even specific messages provided by an opponent.
References
- ↑ Vaudenay, Serge (September 16, 2005). A Classical Introduction to Cryptography: Applications for Communications Security (1st ed.). Springer. p. 254. ISBN 978-0-387-25464-7.
- ↑ Goldwasser, Shafi; Bellare, Mihir (2008). Lecture Notes on Cryptography. Summer course on cryptography. p. 170.
- 1 2 Fabrizio d'Amore (April 2012). "Digital signatures - DSA" (PDF). La Sapienza University of Rome. pp. 8–9. Retrieved July 27, 2018.
- ↑ Smart, Nigel P. Cryptography Made Simple. Springer. p. 217. ISBN 978-3-319-21935-6.