Ring signature and group signature are two major cryptographic primitives providing users anonymity and authentication simultaneously. While both primitives enable any user to sign messages as a member of a set of users, the feature of ring signature is that a signer can choose a group in an ad-hoc manner, which is called a ring, by itself. Conversely, in group signature, a group membership is managed by some trusted third party, which is called a group manager, and an (appropriate) accountability is provided for the group manager to identify illegal anonymous signers. Accountable ring signature (ARS) is a cryptographic primitive combining the features of ring signature and group signature. ARS allows signers to choose their groups (rings) in an ad-hoc manner, and at the same time, maintain accountability by forcing them to select a designated opener who can identify them.In this paper, we propose the first ARS scheme with O(logn) signature size in the standard model (without depending on the random oracle methodology), where n is the size of a ring. More precisely, we propose a new generic construction of ARS based on (standard) signature, (standard) public key encryption, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof system, somewhere perfectly binding hash function, and public key encryption with non-interactive opening. All building blocks for our ARS scheme can be obtained under the decisional linear (DLIN) assumption over bilinear groups.
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