Secure Key Management in the Cloud

Ivan Damgård; Thomas P.  Jakobsen; Jesper Buus Nielsen; Jakob I.  Pagter

Paper 2013/629

Secure Key Management in the Cloud

Ivan Damgård, Thomas P. Jakobsen, Jesper Buus Nielsen, and Jakob I. Pagter

Abstract

We consider applications involving a number of servers in the cloud that go through a sequence of online periods where the servers communicate, separated by offline periods where the servers are idle. During the offline periods, we assume that the servers need to securely store sensitive information such as cryptographic keys. Applications like this include many cases where secure multiparty computation is outsourced to the cloud, and in particular a number of online auctions and benchmark computations with confidential inputs. We consider fully autonomous servers that switch between online and offline periods without communicating with anyone from outside the cloud, and semi-autonomous servers that need a limited kind of assistance from outside the cloud when doing the transition. We study the levels of security one can - and cannot - obtain in this model, propose light-weight protocols achieving maximal security, and report on their practical performance.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Major revision. 14th IMA Conference on Cryptography and Coding (IMA CC 2013)
Keywords: applications key management secret sharing threshold cryptography
Contact author(s): tpj @ cs au dk
History: 2013-09-30: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2013/629
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/629,
      author = {Ivan Damgård and Thomas P.  Jakobsen and Jesper Buus Nielsen and Jakob I.  Pagter},
      title = {Secure Key Management in the Cloud},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2013/629},
      year = {2013},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/629}
}