Paper 2002/129 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2002/129 ↗

Key-collisions in (EC)DSA: Attacking Non-repudiation

Abstract

A new kind of attack on the non-repudiation property of digital signature schemes is presented. We introduce a notion of key-collisions, which may allow an attacker to claim that the message (presented to a judge) has been signed by someone else. We show how to compute key-collisions for the DSA and ECDSA signature schemes effectively. The main idea of these attacks has been inspired by the well-known notion of message-collisions, where an attacker claims that the signature presented at the court belongs to a different message. Both of these collision-based attacks significantly weaken the non-repudiation property of signature schemes. Moreover, they weaken the non-repudiation of protocols based on these schemes. It is shown that key-collision resistance of the (EC)DSA schemes requires the incorporation of a mechanism ensuring honest generation of (EC)DSA instances. The usage of such a mechanism shall be verifiable by an independent third party without revealing any secret information. We propose and discuss basic general countermeasures against key-collision attacks on the (EC)DSA schemes.