ECE Professor Jerry Park and Vireshwar Kumar (VT alumnus and Park's former Ph.D. advisee) are the co-inventors of a US patent, entitled "Group signatures with probabilistic revocation (Patent No. 10,326,602)," that was recently published by the US Patent & Trademark Office.

Digital group signatures is an elegant, but computationally expensive, method for providing privacy-preserving authentication in a number of emerging applications, including vehicle-to-everything (V2X) safety applications, electronic voting, electronic auctions, etc.

The primary drawback of group signature schemes, which is limiting their application to commercial products, is the high computational complexity of their revocation procedure. The revocation procedure, which is a critical part of group signatures, is needed to revoke outdated or invalid keys.

In this patent, the inventors describe a novel revocation procedure whose computational complexity is much lower compared to that of the prior art. Significant computational efficiency is achieved by employing a novel, probabilistic algorithm for evaluating the revocation status of each group signature.