Abstract
Designing escrow encryption schemes is an area of much recent interest. However, the basic design issues, characterizations and difficulties of escrow systems are not fully understood or specified yet. This paper demonstrates that in public-key based escrow, the combination of (1) two different receivers (intended receiver and potentially law enforcement); and (2) on-line verified compliance assurance by the sender which ensures that law enforcement can decrypt ciphertext upon court order, is equivalent to a “chosen ciphertext secure public-key system” (i.e., one secure against an adversary who uses the decryption oracle before trying to decipher a target ciphertext). If we further add measures to ensure that law enforcement is given access to messages only within an authorized context and law enforcement is assured to comply as well (i.e., it cannot frame users), then the escrow system is equivalent to “non-malleable encryption schemes”. The characterizations provide a theoretical under-pinning for escrow encryption and also lead us to new designs.
Research performed while at Sandia National Laboratories. This work was performed under U.S. Department of Energy Contract number DE-AC04-76AL85000.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
M. Bellare and O. Goldreich, On Defining Proofs of Knowledge, Crypto '92.
M. Bellare and O. Goldwasser, Verifiable Partial Key Escrow, ACM, 4-th Symp. on Computer and Comm. Security, 1997.
M. Bellare and R. Rivest, Translucent Cryptography-an alternative to key escrow and its implementation via fractional oblivious transfer, a manuscript.
M. Bellare and P. Rogaway, Random Oracles are Practical: a paradigm for designing efficient protocols, ACM, 1-st Comp. and Com. Sec. 1993.
T. Beth, H.-J. Knobloch, M. Otten, G.J. Simmons and P.Wichmann, Towards Acceptable Key Escrow Systems, In the Proceedings of The 2nd ACM Symp. on Comp. and Comm. Security, 1994 51–58.
M. Blaze, Protocol failure in the Escrowed Encryption Standard, In the Proceedings of The 2nd ACM Symp. on Comp. and Comm. Security, 1994, 59–67.
M. Blaze, J. Feigenbaum and T. Leighton, Master-Key Cryptosystems, Crypto-95 Rump session.
Building in Big Brothers: the cryptographic policy debate, ed. L.J. Hoffman, Springer Verlag, 1995.
I. Damgård, Towards practical public key cryptoSystems secure against chosen ciphertext attacks, Crypto '91.
D. E. Denning and M. Smid, Key Escrowing Now, IEEE Communications Magazine, Sep. 1994, pp. 54–68.
A. De Santis, Y. Desmedt, Y. Frankel and M. Yung, How to Share a Function Securely, ACM STOC 94.
A. De Santis, and G. Persiano, Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof of Knowledge, FOCS 93.
Y. Desrnedt and Y. Frankel, Threshold cryptosystems, Crypto '89.
Y. Desmedt, Securing Traceability of Ciphertexts: Towards a Secure Software Key Escrow Systems, Eurocrypt 95.
L. Knudsen and T. Pedersen, On the Difficulty of Software Escrowing, Eurocrypt 96.
D. Dolev, C. Dwork and M. Naor, Non-Malleable Cryptography, STOC 91.
U. Feige, A. Fiat and A. Shamir, Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Identity, Journal of Cryptology, vol. 1, 1988, pp. 77–94. (Originally: STOC 87).
The FBI, Law Enforcement requirements for the Surveillance of Electronic Communications, June 1994.
FIPS PUB 185, Escrowed Encryption Standard Feb.94. (Dep. of Commerce).
Y. Frankel and M. Yung, Escrow Encryption Visited: Attacks, Analysis and Designs. Crypto '95.
Y. Frankel and M. Yung, Cryptanalysis of the immunized LL public key systems. Crypto '95.
S. Goldwasser and S. Micali, Probabilistic Encryption, J. Com. Sys. Sci. 28 (1984), pp 270–299.
R. Impagliazzo and M. Luby, One-way Functions are Essential for Complexity-Based Cryptography FOCS 89.
R. Impagliazzo and S. Rudich, Limits on the Provable Consequences of Oneway Permutations, STOC 89.
N. Jefferies, C. Mitchell and M. Walker, A Proposed Architecture for Trusted Third Party Services, in Cryptography: Policy and Algorithms, Springer Verlag LNCS 1029, 1996. (Also: Royal Holloway, U. of London Report, 95).
J. Kilian and F.T. Leighton, Fair Cryptosystems, Revisited, Crypto '95.
A. Lenstra, P. Winkler and Y. Yacobi, A key escrow system with warrant bounds, Crypto '95.
C. H. Lim and P. J. Lee, Another method for attaining security against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks, Crypto '93.
M. Luby, Pseudorandomness and its Cryptographic Applications, Princeton Univ. Press, 1995.
S. Micali, Fair public-key cryptosystems, Crypto '92.
S. Micali and R. Sidney, A simple method for generating and sharing pseudorandom functions with applications to clipper-like key escrow systems, Crypto '95.
M. Naor and M. Yung, Universal One-way Hash Functions and their Cryptographic Applications, STOC 89.
M. Naor and M. Yung, Public-key cryptosystem provably secure against chosen ciphertext attack, STOC 1990.
NIST, Issues: Export of software key escrow encryption, August 1995. see: http://csrc.ncsl.nist.gov/keyescrow/
C. Rackoff and D. Simon, Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof of Knowledge and Chosen Ciphertext Attacks, Crypto '91.
J. Rompel One-way Functions are Necessary and Sufficient for Secure Signatures, STOC 90.
A. Shamir, Partial Key Escrow, Crypto 95 Rump Session.
M. Tompa and H. Woll, Random Self-Reducibility and Zero-Knowledge Interactive Proofs of Possession of Information, FOCS 87.
A. C. Yao, Theory and Applications of Trapdoor functions, FOCS 82.
Y. Zheng and J. Seberry, Immunizing public key cryptosystems against chosen ciphertext attacks, IEEE JSAC 93.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Frankel, Y., Yung, M. (1997). On characterizations of escrow encryption schemes. In: Degano, P., Gorrieri, R., Marchetti-Spaccamela, A. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1256. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63165-8_224
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63165-8_224
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-63165-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69194-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive