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Paper 2014/803

A Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure with Identity Retention

Conner Fromknecht, Dragos Velicanu, 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 infrastructurebitcoin
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
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
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