Foundations of Group Signatures: Formal Definitions, Simplified Requirements, and a Construction Based on General Assumptions

This paper provides theoretical foundations for the group signature primitive. We introduce strong, formal definitions for the core requirements of anonymity and traceability. We then show that these imply the large set of sometimes ambiguous existing informal requirements in the literature, thereby unifying and simplifying the requirements for this primitive. Finally we prove the existence of a construct meeting our definitions based only on the assumption that trapdoor permutations exist.