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International Workshop on Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography

FDTC 2006: Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography pp 144–158Cite as

Cryptographic Key Reliable Lifetimes: Bounding the Risk of Key Exposure in the Presence of Faults

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 4236))

Abstract

With physical attacks threatening the security of current cryptographic schemes, no security policy can be developed without taking into account the physical nature of computation.

In this paper we adapt classical reliability modeling techniques to cryptographic systems. We do so by first introducing the notions of Cryptographic Key Failure Tolerance and Cryptographic Key Reliable Lifetimes. Then we offer a framework for the determination of reliable lifetimes of keys for any cryptographic scheme used in the presence of faults, given an accepted (negligible) error-bound to the risk of key exposure. Finally we emphasize the importance of selecting keys and designing schemes with good values of failure tolerance, and recommend minimal values for this metric. In fact, in standard environmental conditions, cryptographic keys that are especially susceptible to erroneous computations (e.g., RSA keys used with CRT-based implementations) are exposed with a probability greater than a standard error-bound (e.g., 2− − 40) after operational times shorter than one year, if the failure-rate of the cryptographic infrastructure is greater than 1.04×10− − 16 failures/hours.

A preliminary version of this paper appeared as a COSIC Technical Report.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Andxor S.r.l., via F.lli Gracchi, 27, Cinisello Balsamo (MI), 20092, Italy

    Alfonso De Gregorio

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  1. Alfonso De Gregorio
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

    Luca Breveglieri

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Israel Koren

  3. École normale supérieure, Équipe de cryptographie, 45 rue d’Ulm, F-75230, Paris cedex 05, France

    David Naccache

  4. Institute for Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria

    Jean-Pierre Seifert

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De Gregorio, A. (2006). Cryptographic Key Reliable Lifetimes: Bounding the Risk of Key Exposure in the Presence of Faults. In: Breveglieri, L., Koren, I., Naccache, D., Seifert, JP. (eds) Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography. FDTC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4236. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11889700_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11889700_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-46250-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46251-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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