Structured signatures are digital signatures where relationship between signers is guaranteed in addition to the validity of individually generated data for each signer, and have been expected for the digital right management. Nevertheless, we mention that there is no scheme with a tight security reduction, to the best of our knowledge. Loosely speaking, it means that the security is downgraded against an adversary who obtains a large amount of signatures. Since contents are widely utilized in general, achieving a tighter reduction is desirable. Based on this background, we propose the first structured signature scheme with a tight security reduction in the conventional public key cryptography and the one with a rigorous reduction proof in the ID-based cryptography via our new proof method. Moreover, the security of our schemes can be proven under the CDH assumption which is the most standard. Our schemes are also based on bilinear maps whose implementation can be provided via well-known cryptographic libraries.

Within information hiding technology, digital watermarking is one of the most important technologies for copyright protection of digital content. Many digital watermarking schemes have been proposed in academia. However, these schemes are not used, because they are not practical; one reason for this is that the evaluation criteria are loosely defined. To make the evaluation more concrete and improve the practicality of digital watermarking, watermarking schemes must use common evaluation criteria. To realize such criteria, we organized the Information Hiding and its Criteria for Evaluation (IHC) Committee to create useful, globally accepted evaluation criteria for information hiding technology. The IHC Committee improves their evaluation criteria every year, and holds a competition for digital watermarking based on state-of-the-art evaluation criteria. In this paper, we describe the activities of the IHC Committee and its evaluation criteria for digital watermarking of still images, videos, and audio.