Key Evolution Systems in Untrusted Update Environments

  • Authors:
  • Benoît Libert;Jean-Jacques Quisquater;Moti Yung

  • Affiliations:
  • Université Catholique de Louvain, Crypto Group;Université Catholique de Louvain, Crypto Group;Google Inc. and Columbia University

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Forward-Secure Signatures (FSS) prevent forgeries for past time periods when an attacker obtains full access to the signer’s storage by evolving the private key in a one-way fashion. To simplify the integration of these primitives into standard security architectures, Boyen et al. [2006] recently introduced the concept of forward-secure signatures with untrusted updates where private keys are additionally protected by a second factor (derived from a password). Key updates can be made on encrypted version of signing keys so that passwords only come into play for signing messages and not at update time (since update is not user-driven). The scheme put forth by Boyen et al. relies on bilinear maps and does not require the random oracle. They also suggest the integration of untrusted updates in the Bellare-Miner forward-secure signature. Their work left open the problem of endowing other existing FSS systems with the same second factor protection, and a natural second question is whether the method can apply to other key-evolving paradigms. This article solves the first problem by showing an efficient generic construction that does not require to set a bound on the number of time periods at key generation. The article then extends the unprotected update model to other key-evolving primitives such as forward-secure public key encryption and key-insulated cryptosystems.