A Survey on Proxy Re-Signature Schemes for Translating One Type of Signature to Another

Proxy Re-Signature (PRS) complements well-established digital signature service. Blaze-Bleumer-Strauss discussed PRS in 1998 for translating a signature on a message from Alice into a signature from Bob on the same message at semi-trusted proxy which does not learn any signing-key and cannot produce new valid signature on new message for Alice or Bob. PRS has been largely ignored since then but it has spurred considerable research interest recently for sharing web-certificates, forming weak-group signatures, and authenticating network path. This article provides a survey summarizing and organizing PRS-related research by developing eight-dimensional taxonomy reflecting the directional feature, re-transformation capability, re-signature key location, delegatee involvement, proxy re-signing rights, duration-based revocation rights, security model environment, and cryptographic approach. Even though multi-dimensional categorization is proposed here, we categorize the substantial published research work based on the eighth dimension. We give a clear perspective on this research from last two-decades since the first PRS-protocol was proposed.