Verifier-local revocation group signatures with backward unlinkability from lattices

For group signature (GS) supporting membership revocation, verifier-local revocation (VLR) mechanism seems to be a more flexible choice, because it requires only that verifiers download up-to-date revocation information for signature verification, and the signers are not involved. As a post-quantum secure cryptographic counterpart of classical number-theoretic cryptographic constructions, the first lattice-based VLR group signature (VLR-GS) was introduced by Langlois et al. (2014). However, none of the contemporary lattice-based VLR-GS schemes provide backward unlinkability (BU), which is an important property to ensure that previously issued signatures remain anonymous and unlinkable even after the corresponding signer (i.e., member) is revoked. In this study, we introduce the first lattice-based VLR-GS scheme with BU security (VLR-GS-BU), and thus resolve a prominent open problem posed by previous works. Our new scheme enjoys an O( log N) factor saving for bit-sizes of the group public-key (GPK) and the member’s signing secret-key, and it is free of any public-key encryption. In the random oracle model, our scheme is proven secure under two well-known hardness assumptions of the short integer solution (SIS) problem and learning with errors (LWE) problem.