Forward-secure identity-based signature: Security notions and construction

The security of traditional identity-based signatures wholly depends on the security of secret keys. Exposure of secret keys requires reissuing all previously assigned signatures. This limitation becomes more obvious today as key exposure is more common with increasing use of mobile and unprotected devices. Under this background, mitigating the damage of key exposure in identity-based signatures is an important problem. To deal with this problem, we propose to integrate forward security into identity-based signatures. In this paper, we firstly formalize the definition and security notions for forward-secure identity-based signature scheme, and then construct an efficient scheme. All parameters in our scheme have, at most, log-squared complexity in terms of the total number of time periods. The scheme is provably secure without random oracles.