A Smart Contract-based Non-Transferable Signature Verification System using Nominative Signatures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a blockchain-based system for non-transferable nominative signatures that can verify both the signer and the occurrence of future money transfers, enhancing security in cryptocurrency transactions.

Contribution

It transforms a symmetric pairing nominative signature scheme into an asymmetric pairing scheme and evaluates its gas costs for smart contract implementation.

Findings

Successfully verified the transformed scheme's security properties.

Measured and analyzed gas costs for smart contract verification.

Enhanced non-transferable signature verification with transfer confirmation capability.

Abstract

Nominative signatures allow us to indicate who can verify a signature, and they can be employed to construct a non-transferable signature verification system that prevents the signature verification by a third party in unexpected situations. For example, this system can prevent IOU/loan certificate verification in unexpected situations. However, nominative signatures themselves do not allow the verifier to check whether the funds will be transferred in the future or have been transferred.It would be desirable to verify the fact simultaneously when the system involves a certain money transfer such as cryptocurrencies/cryptoassets. In this paper, we propose a smart contract-based non-transferable signature verification system using nominative signatures. We pay attention to the fact that the invisibility, which is a security requirement to be held for nominative signatures, allows us to publish nominative signatures on the blockchain. Our system can verify whether a money transfer actually will take place, in addition to indicating who can verify a signature. We transform the Hanaoka-Schuldt nominative signature scheme (ACNS 2011, IEICE Trans. 2016) which is constructed over a symmetric pairing to a scheme constructed over an asymmetric pairing, and evaluate the gas cost when a smart contract runs the verification algorithm of the modified Hanaoka-Schuldt nominative signature scheme.