A lightweight electronic signature scheme using Twitter

In many application contexts, qualified electronic signature are difficult to adopt due to cost and technological reasons. As the European legislation admits the use of (non-qualified) electronic signatures in several cases, the design of new signature protocols with cheapness and usability features is a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight electronic signature protocol that does not require any public key infrastructure, cryptography and dedicated device, yet guaranteeing a good level of security. The protocol is conceived for closed domains of users, such as the case of documents exchanged between employees of a company. Signature and verification processes rely on the Twitter social network and do not require any changes of its features. A system prototype has been also designed and implemented to show that the adoption of our solution is both realistic and effective.

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