An XML multisignature scheme

摘要

Extensible markup language (XML) has become a standard format for data interchanges on the Internet especially in the electronic commerce. Although it is extremely important to protect XML documents from being illegally modified, the development of XML security is still in its infancy stage. One of major research areas in XML security is XML Signature. In the past, conventional multisignature schemes allow participant signers only sign on the whole document and thus make multisignature generations become inefficient. To overcome the problem, Wu et al. proposed a delegated multisignature scheme so that participant signers sign on the subdocuments that they are responsible. However, due to the rich structure of XML, all the multisignature schemes proposed so far are not appropriate for XML documents. In this paper, by utilizing the logical structure of XML and Wu’s scheme, we proposed an XML multisignature scheme. In our scheme, it inherits the merits of Wu’s scheme, further improves the efficiency in multisignature generation by signing the rules rather than the subdocuments, provides fine-grained control at the element level, and also is compatible with the XML Signature standard. Additionally, this scheme proposes a new signature generation approach that is based on the structure of the signed document rather than the signed document alone.