Secure and Efficient Digital Signature Scheme for Document Authentication using EDDSA and Watermarking

Abstract

The growing use of electronic documents in the private business, legal and financial institutions has increased the demands of secure digital authentication systems which can provide strong security guarantees as well as sound forensic validation. However, many existing digital document authentication methods suffer from high computational and communication overhead, lack confidentiality measures and effective tampering detection techniques and also limited resistance to security attacks, particularly in multi-signatory environments. This paper introduces an efficient integrated digital signature scheme that combines Edward’s curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EDDSA) for deterministic and nonce secure digital signing. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has low signing time and high watermark correlation accuracy for tamper detection, and reliable identification of replayed and altered documents. The proposed scheme has a significant reduction in communication and storage overheads, significantly faster verification under large signatory groups, and improved resistance to sniffing and replay attacks.