Network Security Cryptographic Protocols and Lattice Problems

We present a new protocol for electronic cash which is designed to function on hardware with limited computing power. The scheme has provable security properties and low computational requirements, but it still gives a fair amount of privacy. Another feature of the system is that there is no master secret that could be used for counterfeiting money if stolen.  We introduce the notion of hierarchical group signatures. This is a proper generalization of group signatures, which allows multiple group managers organized in a tree with the signers as leaves. For a signer that is a leaf of the sub tree of a group manager, the group manager learns which of its children that (perhaps indirectly) manages the signer.

Keywords: electronic cash; security properties; counterfeiting ; computational; hierarchical