Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems

Bruce Schneier; Matthew Fredrikson; Tadayoshi Kohno; Thomas Ristenpart

Paper 2015/097

Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems

Bruce Schneier, Matthew Fredrikson, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Thomas Ristenpart

Abstract

Revelations over the past couple of years highlight the importance of understanding malicious and surreptitious weakening of cryptographic systems. We provide an overview of this domain, using a number of historical examples to drive development of a weaknesses taxonomy. This allows comparing different approaches to sabotage. We categorize a broader set of potential avenues for weakening systems using this taxonomy, and discuss what future research is needed to provide sabotage-resilient cryptography.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: Sabotage cryptographic weaknesses backdoors
Contact author(s): rist @ cs wisc edu
History: 2015-02-23: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2015/097
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/097,
      author = {Bruce Schneier and Matthew Fredrikson and Tadayoshi Kohno and Thomas Ristenpart},
      title = {Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/097},
      year = {2015},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/097}
}