Identity verifiable ring signature scheme for privacy protection in blockchain

The revolutionary technology blockchain is spreading into many applications because of its features like immutability, decentralization, verifiability, and security. One such application is an e-auction, where the buyer submits the bids to buy the products or services from the sellers. To make this process work, a trusted third party must host the e-auction to ensure the participants’ anonymity and the exchange’s fairness. However, the third party has access to critical information about the users. As a result, there are constant risks ranging from single-point failure to collusion attacks, and finding a totally trustworthy institution to serve such a role, in reality, is difficult. As a solution, blockchain can be considered as a potential trusted party that can be trusted for correctness and availability. But it does not provide identity privacy to its participants. So, a crypto primitive is necessary to handle the user identity privacy challenges on blockchain-based e-auctions, and one such primitive is a ring signature scheme. Although everlasting anonymity in ring signatures seems to benefit users, they cannot identify the message’s real signers. So, to protect user identity privacy and determine the message’s real signer in blockchain-based e-auctions, we propose an identity-verifiable ring signature scheme (IVRSS) in this article. This paper also carries out the correctness proof and security analysis of the proposed scheme. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management.