Paper 2024/107

ELEKTRA: Efficient Lightweight multi-dEvice Key TRAnsparency

Abstract

Key Transparency (KT) systems enable service providers of end-to-end encrypted communication (E2EE) platforms to maintain a Verifiable Key Directory (VKD) that maps each user's identifier, such as a username or email address, to their identity public key(s). Users periodically monitor the directory to ensure their own identifier maps to the correct keys, thus detecting any attempt to register a fake key on their behalf to Meddler-in-the-Middle (MitM) their communications. We introduce and formalize a new primitive called Multi-Device Verifiable Key Directory (MVKD), which strengthens both the security, privacy, and usability guarantees of VKD by leveraging the multi-device setting. We formalize three properties for a MVKD (completeness, extraction-based soundness, and privacy), striking a non-trivial balance between strong guarantees and the limitations imposed by a truly practical system. We then present a new MVKD system called ELEKTRA. This system combines the core of the Keybase KT system (running in production since 2014) with ideas from SEEMless (Chase et. al., 2019) and RZKS (Chen et. al., 2022). Our construction is the first to achieve the above multi-device guarantees while having formal security and privacy proofs. Finally, we implement ELEKTRA and present benchmarks demonstrating its practicality.