Susceptibility of digital signature schemes based on error-correcting codes to universal forgery

Xinmei´s (1990) digital signature scheme and the scheme´s modified version as proposed by Harn and Wang have been shown by the authors and others to be susceptible to several different attacks. The authors have since devised and presented a scheme that is impervious to the attacks that were successfully applied to the earlier schemes. It is shown that this new scheme and Xinmei´s scheme are vulnerable to universal forgeries. Equipped with this attack and the earlier ones, general remarks about digital signature schemes based on linear error-correcting block codes are presented