A Survey on Digital Signatures

Abstract: The importance of authentication is increasing due to increase of online transactions over the internet. There is a need to establish a framework for the authentication of computer-based information. A Digital Signature is one of the authentication mechanisms. A valid digital signature gives a recipient reason to believe that the message was created by a known sender, and that it was not altered in transit. Digital signatures are commonly used for software distribution, financial transactions, and in other cases where it is important to detect forgery or tampering. Various asymmetric cryptosystems create and verify digital signatures using different algorithms and procedures. This paper performs security analysis of Digital Signature schemes; RSA, DSA and EIGamal. A cryptographic tool is used for conducting experiments. Experiments results are given to analyses the effectiveness of each algorithm.

Keywords: Cryptography, Digital signature, Message digest, Authentication