Efficient Identity-Based Signatures Secure in the Standard Model

The only known construction of identity-based signatures that can be proven secure in the standard model is based on the approach of attaching certificates to non-identity-based signatures. This folklore construction method leads to schemes that are somewhat inefficient and leaves open the problem of finding more efficient direct constructions. We present the first such construction. Our scheme is obtained from a modification of Waters’ recently proposed identity-based encryption scheme. It is computationally efficient and the signatures are short. The scheme’s security is proven in the standard model and rests on the hardness of the computational Diffie-Hellman problem in groups equipped with a pairing.