Blinded RSA signatures

[Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>]

> The article made no
> mention of how to do this "blinding".

> This morning I came up with a method which I would like
> comments upon.  

Apparently the first author (the one being quoted in the forwarded
message) had never been exposed to the relevant math before.  What is
therefore significant is that this person has exactly reconstructed
the basic Chaum blind signature, except for notation.

The basic blind signature does not work well in practice, since the
product of two such signatures is also a signature.  In practice one
signs a one-way hash function of the message text and exhibits the
actual text; this destroys the ability to multiply signatures, assuming
that finding multiplicative pairs for the hash function is hard.

This scheme of algebraic blinding is quite easy to apply, once you get
the hang of it.  For example, it is behind the core of the encrypted
open books protocol, where to blind g^x you create a pair g^(x+r),h^r.
Basically all of the atomic operations that recent cryptology uses--
e.g. exponentiation in finite rings, both in the discrete log systems
and in RSA, integer multiplication in elliptic curves--are amenable to
blinding.  The El Gamal signature scheme uses a random number to
create the signature pair.

Applications to existing protocols are left as an exercise by the
reader.

Eric