Mumbai University > Computer Engineering > Sem 6 > Mobile Communication & Computing

Marks: 5 Marks

Year: May 2016

A digital signature is a technique that binds a person/entity to the digital data. This binding can be independently verified by receiver as well as any third party.Digital signature is a cryptographic value that is calculated from the data and a secret key known only by the signer.

In real world, the receiver of message needs assurance that the message belongs to the sender and he should not be able to repudiate the origination of that message.

Model of Digital Signature

The digital signature scheme is based on public key cryptography. The model of digital signature scheme is depicted in the following illustration:

The following points explain the entire process in detail:

1. Each person adopting this scheme has a public-private key pair.
2. Generally, the key pairs used for encryption/decryption and signing/verifying are different. The private key used for signing is referred to as the signature key and the public key as the verification key.
3. Signer feeds data to the hash function and generates hash of data.
4. Hash value and signature key are then fed to the signature algorithm which produces the digital signature on given hash. Signature is appended to the data and then both are sent to the verifier.
5. Verifier feeds the digital signature and the verification key into the verification algorithm. The verification algorithm gives some value as output.
6. Verifier also runs same hash function on received data to generate hash value.
7. For verification, this hash value and output of verification algorithm are compared. Based on the comparison result, verifier decides whether the digital signature is valid.
8. Since digital signature is created by ‘private’ key of signer and no one else can have this key; the signer cannot repudiate signing the data in future.

It should be noticed that instead of signing data directly by signing algorithm, usually a hash of data is created. Since the hash of data is a unique representation of data, it is sufficient to sign the hash in place of data. The most important reason of using hash instead of data directly for signing is efficiency of the scheme.