A Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure with Identity Retention

Conner Fromknecht; Dragos Velicanu; Sophia Yakoubov

Paper 2014/803

A Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure with Identity Retention

Conner Fromknecht, Dragos Velicanu, and Sophia Yakoubov

Abstract

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) enable users to look up and verify one another's public keys based on identities. Current approaches to PKIs are vulnerable because they do not offer sufficiently strong guarantees of \emph{identity retention}; that is, they do not effectively prevent one user from registering a public key under another's already-registered identity. In this paper, we leverage the consistency guarantees provided by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Namecoin to build a PKI that ensures identity retention. Our system, called Certcoin, has no central authority and thus requires the use of secure distributed dictionary data structures to provide efficient support for key lookup.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: public key infrastructure bitcoin
Contact author(s): sonka @ bu edu
History: 2014-11-11: last of 2 revisions; 2014-10-10: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2014/803
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/803,
      author = {Conner Fromknecht and Dragos Velicanu and Sophia Yakoubov},
      title = {A Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure with Identity Retention},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2014/803},
      year = {2014},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/803}
}