A Strongly Unlinkable Group Signature Scheme with Matching-Based Verifier-Local Revocation for Privacy-Enhancing Crowdsensing

A group signature scheme allows us to anonymously sign a message on behalf of a group. One of important issues in the group signatures is user revocation, and thus lots of revocable group signature (RGS) schemes have been proposed so far. One of the applications suitable to the group signature is privacy-enhancing crowdsensing, where the group signature allows mobile sensing users to be anonymously authenticated to hide the location. In the mobile environment, verifier-local revocation (VLR) type of RGS schemes are suitable, since revocation list (RL) is not needed in the user side. However, in the conventional VLR-RGS schemes, the revocation check in the verifier needs O(R) cryptographic operations for the number R of revoked users. On this background, VLR-RGS schemes with efficient revocation check have been recently proposed, where the revocation check is just (bit-string) matching. However, in the existing schemes, signatures are linkable in the same interval or in the same task with a public index. In this paper, by introducing a limitation that at most K signatures can be issued by a signer during each interval for a fixed integer K, we propose a VLR-RGS scheme with the revocation token matching. In our scheme, even the signatures during the same interval are unlinkable. Furthermore, since used indexes are hidden, the strong anonymity remains. The overheads are the computational costs of the revocation algorithm and the RL size. We show that the overheads are practical in use cases of crowdsensing.