Abstract
When the safety community designs their systems to also maintain security properties, it is likely that public-key encryption will be among the tools that are applied.
The security guarantees of this technology are based on a particular model of computation. We present the properties of this model that are relevant in the setting of distributed systems. Of particular importance is that the model has no notion of time.
From this it follows that systems that need to be available must exercise the utmost care before applying public-key encryption in any form. We discuss the relation between public-key encryption and timeliness, the tradeoffs that must be made at design time, and how the property of (lack of) availability might very well contaminate other system components.
This work has been generously supported by the Research Council of Norway by means of the Arctic Bean project (IKT 2010, project number 146986/431) and the Penne project (IKTSoS project number 158569/431).
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Stabell-Kulø, T., Lupetti, S. (2005). Public-Key Cryptography and Availability. In: Winther, R., Gran, B.A., Dahll, G. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3688. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11563228_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11563228_17
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