Mitigating the untrusted terminal problem using conditional signatures

We study the problem of how a user at an untrusted terminal can generate digital signatures with the help of a smart card. This problem may arise in many practical applications; an example would be a user generating an electronic check at a merchant's terminal in a shop. The danger is that the terminal can obtain a signature from the card on an arbitrarily chosen document, that is different from the one displayed on the screen and confirmed by the user. We propose a solution to this problem which is based on a new concept called conditional signature. This leads to a new paradigm where digital signatures are not considered as non-repudiable proofs, at least until a short deadline.