Another Look at Digital Signatures

Scott A. Vanstone

Digital signatures are truly one of the remarkable outcomes resulting from the discovery in 1976 of public-key cryptography. Digital signatures give us the ability to authenticate data and entities along with the ability to prevent repudiation of a signature by the signer. In this lecture we will give an overview of several well known digital signature schemes, discuss their strengths, and identify important details which need to be considered when fielding such mechanisms in practice. A new concern is identified which seems to have been previously overlooked. This is easily remedied and we will describe how to do this along with some new directions that this research is taking us.