VERIFICATION OF IDENTITY BASED SIGNATURES

摘要

A database management system (1) comprises up to fifty or more workstations (2), each for a user. The environment may, for example, be a hospital and the system manages medical records in a secure manner. Each user has a private key issued by a KGC (5). A database controller (3) updates a secure database (3) with data and associated signatures generated by the user workstations (2). Thus every record of the secure database (3) has a signature to provide full traceability and non-repudiation of data edits/updates. It is important for the system (1) that the signatures are verified on a regular basis, say every hour. Such a task would be extremely processor-intensive if the database (3) is large. However this is performed by a verification processor (4) of the system (1) in a much shorter time than heretofore, t1 + n(Delta), where t1 is the time for one verification, n is the number of signatures, and Delta is a time value which is a very small proportion of t1 (less than 1%).