Functional signatures

Abstract

In this thesis, we introduce the notion of functional signatures. In a functional signature scheme, in addition to a master signing key that can be used to sign any message, there are signing keys for a function f, which allow one to sign any message in the range of f. An immediate application of functional signature scheme is the delegation by a master authority to a third party of the ability to sign a restricted set of messages. We also show applications of functional signature in constructing succinct non-interactive arguments and delegation schemes. We give several constructions for this primitive, and describe the trade-offs between them in terms of the assumptions they require and the size of the signatures.