An Efficient Code-Based Threshold Ring Signature Scheme with a Leader-Participant Model

Digital signature schemes with additional properties have broad applications, such as in protecting the identity of signers allowing a signer to anonymously sign a message in a group of signers (also known as a ring). While these number-theoretic problems are still secure at the time of this research, the situation could change with advances in quantum computing. There is a pressing need to design PKC schemes that are secure against quantum attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel code-based threshold ring signature scheme with a leader-participant model. A leader is appointed, who chooses some shared parameters for other signers to participate in the signing process. This leader-participant model enhances the performance because every participant including the leader could execute the decoding algorithm (as a part of signing process) upon receiving the shared parameters from the leader. The time complexity of our scheme is close to Courtois et al.'s (2001) scheme. The latter is often used as a basis to construct other types of code-based signature schemes. Moreover, as a threshold ring signature scheme, our scheme is as efficient as the normal code-based ring signature.