Digital signatures serve as a crucial cryptographic primitive in an e-governance system for authenticating citizen-government interactions. Traditional methods (DSA, ECDSA) impose computational overhead on resource-limited endpoints and centralized verification servers. While complex-number cryptography provides theoretical efficiency through the Complex Discrete-Logarithm Problem (CDLP), prior works often fail to meet the requirements for real-world applications. This paper advances the knowledge in lightweight cryptography by introducing LDSEGoV, a lightweight digital signature scheme for e-governance infrastructure. The proposed method overcomes the shortcomings of previous methods by incorporating sound modular arithmetic for consistent verification, using NIST-approved hash functions. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive security analysis, including formal proofs of existential unforgeability (EUF-CMA) for the proposed scheme in the Random Oracle Model. Additionally, the experimental results show a 6.5× improvement in signing performance and a 24.76× improvement in verification performance over ECDSA, with a 61% reduction in signature size. These results demonstrate computational efficiency suitable for e-governance authentication scenarios.
Sirpal et al. (Tue,) studied this question.