A New Revocable and Re-Delegable Proxy Signature and Its Application

With the popularity of cloud computing and mobile Apps, on-demand services such as on-line music or audio streaming and vehicle booking are widely available nowadays. In order to allow efficient delivery and management of the services, for large-scale on-demand systems, there is usually a hierarchy where the service provider can delegate its service to a top-tier (e.g., countrywide) proxy who can then further delegate the service to lower level (e.g., region-wide) proxies. Secure (re-)delegation and revocation are among the most crucial factors for such systems. In this paper, we investigate the practical solutions for achieving re-delegation and revocation utilizing proxy signature. Although proxy signature has been extensively studied in the literature, no previous solution can achieve both properties. To fill the gap, we introduce the notion of revocable and re-delegable proxy signature that supports efficient revocation and allows a proxy signer to re-delegate its signing right to other proxy signers without the interaction with the original signer. We define the formal security models for this new primitive and present an efficient scheme that can achieve all the security properties. We also present a secure on-line revocable and re-delegate vehicle ordering system (RRVOS) as one of the applications of our proposed scheme.