Paper 2005/446

Democratic Group Signatures on Example of Joint Ventures

Mark Manulis

Abstract

In the presence of economic globalization joint venture is one of the most common and effective means of conducting business internationally. By building joint ventures companies form strategic alliances that help them to enter new economic markets and further their business goals in a cooperative effort without loosing own independence. Upon building a joint venture company, two or more "parent" companies agree to share capital, technology, human ressources, risks and rewards in a formation of a new entity under shared control by a "board of directors", which consists of representatives of "parent" companies. The establishment of such shared control is tricky and relies generally on the "trust, but verify" relationship, i.e., companies trust the information they receive from prospective partners, but it is a good business practice to verify the facts. In this paper we focus on the issue of the shared financial control in a joint venture. We consider the mostly preferred form of the control where every member of the board is able to issue payment orders on behalf of the joint venture, but at the same time representatives of other companies, should be able to monitor the accounting to achieve fairness in the spending of shared funds. For this form of the shared control we propose a new secure group-oriented signature scheme, called a {\it democratic group signature} scheme, which results from the modification of the standard notion of group signatures by eliminating the role of the group manager. We also show that existing schemes, e.g., ring and group signatures, cannot be used to realize the required shared control based on the "trust, but verify" relationship.

Note: The signature of knowledge in the signing algorithm has been slightly modified.