Notions of Security
In their foundational paper, Goldwasser, Micali, and Rivest lay out a hierarchy of attack models against digital signatures:
- In a key-only attack, the attacker is only given the public verification key.
- In a known message attack, the attacker is given valid signatures for a variety of messages known by the attacker but not chosen by the attacker.
- In an adaptive chosen message attack, the attacker first learns signatures on arbitrary messages of the attacker's choice.
They also describe a hierarchy of attack results:
- A total break results in the recovery of the signing key.
- A universal forgery attack results in the ability to forge signatures for any message.
- A selective forgery attack results in a signature on a message of the adversary's choice.
- An existential forgery merely results in some valid message/signature pair not already known to the adversary.
The strongest notion of security, therefore, is security against existential forgery under an adaptive chosen message attack.
Read more about this topic: Digital Signature
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