Sitemap
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Member-only story

Blind Signatures

3 min readOct 12, 2020

--

The work of David Chaum on privacy showed the world that it could build a world of trust, but preserve privacy. On the back of the work around the ground-breaking RSA method, in 1983, David outlined [here][1]:

Press enter or click to view image in full size

The paper outlined a blinded signature, and Bob can sign for a message, without knowing what the message is. His method used RSA encryption, and where Bob creates his RSA keys in the usual way, and where he selects two prime numbers (p and q) and an encryption key value (e=63,535) and then computes:

Now Alice has a message (m) that she wants Bob to blind sign. She first generates a random value (k) and will then compute:

She sends this to Bob, and who uses his private key (d) to compute:

Bob sends this back, and Alice computes the true signature from Bob:

This is the signature that Bob would have signed the message with and as if Bob had used his private key:

This works because:

--

--

Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Written by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.