Protocols useful on the Internet from distributed signature schemes

Abstract

Distributed cryptography deals with scenarios where a cryptographic operation is performed by a collective of persons. In a distributed signature scheme, a group of players share some secret information in such a way that only authorized subsets of players can compute valid signatures. We propose methods to construct some computationally secure protocols from distributed signature schemes, namely, we construct metering schemes from distributed noninteractive signature schemes. We also show that distributed deterministic signature schemes can be used to design distributed key distribution schemes. In particular, we construct the first metering and distributed key distribution schemes based on the RSA primitive.