Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2001/035

Forward-Security in Private-Key Cryptography

Mihir Bellare and Bennet Yee

Abstract: This paper provides a comprehensive treatment of forward-security in the context of shared-key based cryptographic primitives, as a practical means to mitigate the damage caused by key-exposure. We provide definitions of security, practical proven-secure constructions, and applications for the main primitives in this area. We identify forward-secure pseudorandom bit generators as the central primitive, providing several constructions and then showing how forward-secure message authentication schemes and symmetric encryption schemes can be built based on standard schemes for these problems coupled with forward-secure pseudorandom bit generators. We then apply forward-secure message authentication schemes to the problem of maintaining secure access logs in the presence of break-ins.

Category / Keywords: pseudorandom number generators, forward security, audit logs

Publication Info: An extended abstract of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the CT-RSA 2003 conference. This is the full version.

Date: received 5 May 2001, last revised 18 Nov 2002

Contact author: mihir at cs ucsd edu

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Earlier titled ``Design and application of pseudorandom number generators with forward security.'' The first version of this paper dates to 1998.

Version: 20021118:192014 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2001/035

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