ID-based cryptography has been a very active area of research in cryptography since bilinear pairings were introduced as a cryptographic tool, and there have been many proposals for ID-based signatures recently. In this paper, we introduce the concept of generalized ID-based ElGamal signatures and show that most of the proposed ID-based signature schemes in the literature are special instances of this generalized scheme. We also obtain numerous new signatures from this generalized scheme which have not been proposed before. ©2007 IEEE.