Abstract
Cryptographic techniques based on possession of private keys rely very much on the assumption that the private keys can be used only by the key’s owner. As contemporary architectures of operating systems do not provide such a guarantee, special devices such as smart cards and TPM modules are intended to serve as secure storage for such keys. When carefully designed, these devices can be examined and certified as secure devices for holding private keys. However, this approach has a serious drawback: certification procedure is expensive, requires very specialized knowledge and its result cannot be verified independently by an end-user. On the other hand, malicious cryptography techniques can be used to circumvent the security mechanisms installed in a device. Moreover, in practice we often are forced to retreat to solutions such as generation of the private keys outside secure devices. In this case we are forced to trust blindly the parties providing such services.
We propose an architecture for electronic signatures and signature creation devices such that in case of key leakage, any use of leaked keys will be detected with a fairly high probability. The main idea is that using the private keys outside the legitimate place leads to disclosure of these keys preventing any claims of validity of signatures in any thinkable legal situation.
Our approach is stronger than fail-stop signatures. Indeed, fail-stop signatures protect against derivation of keys via cryptanalysis of public keys, but cannot do anything about key leakage or making a copy of the key by a service provider that generates the key pairs for the clients.
Our approach is a simple alternative to the usual attempts to make cryptographic cards and TPM as tamper resistant as possible, that is, to solve the problem alone by hardware means. It also addresses the question of using private keys stored in not highly secure environment without a dramatic redesign of operating systems. It can be used as a stand alone solution, or just as an additional mechanism for building trust of an end-user.
The paper is partially supported by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, project N N206 2701 33.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Young, A., Yung, M.: Kleptography: Using cryptography against cryptography. In: Fumy, W. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1997. LNCS, vol. 1233, pp. 62–74. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Drimer, S., Murdoch, S.J., Anderson, R.J.: Thinking inside the box: System-level failures of tamper proofing. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 281–295. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2008)
Itkis, G.: Cryptographic tamper evidence. In: CCS 2003: Proc. 10th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 355–364. ACM, New York (2003)
Pfitzmann, B., Waidner, M.: Fail-stop-signaturen und ihre anwendung. In: Pfitzmann, A., Raubold, E. (eds.) VIS. Informatik-Fachberichte, vol. 271, pp. 289–301. Springer, Heidelberg (1991)
van Heyst, E., Pedersen, T.P.: How to make efficient fail-stop signatures. In: Rueppel, R.A. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1992. LNCS, vol. 658, pp. 366–377. Springer, Heidelberg (1993)
Itkis, G., Reyzin, L.: Sibir: Signer-base intrusion-resilient signatures. In: Yung, M. (ed.) CRYPTO 2002. LNCS, vol. 2442, pp. 499–514. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Zhou, J., Bao, F., Deng, R.H.: Validating digital signatures without tTP’s time-stamping and certificate revocation. In: Boyd, C., Mao, W. (eds.) ISC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2851, pp. 96–110. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Xu, S., Yung, M.: Expecting the unexpected: Towards robust credential infrastructure. In: Dingledine, R., Golle, P. (eds.) FC 2009. LNCS, vol. 5628, pp. 201–221. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Boneh, D., Ding, X., Tsudik, G., Wong, C.M.: Instantenous revocation of security capabilities. In: USENIX Security Symposium (2001), http://www.usenix.org/events/sec01/full_papers/boneh/boneh_html/index.html
Chaum, D., Fiat, A., Naor, M.: Untraceable electronic cash. In: Goldwasser, S. (ed.) CRYPTO 1988. LNCS, vol. 403, pp. 319–327. Springer, Heidelberg (1990)
Brands, S.: An efficient off-line electronic cash system based on the representation problem. Technical report (1993)
Chaum, D., Pedersen, T.P.: Wallet databases with observers. In: Brickell, E.F. (ed.) CRYPTO 1992. LNCS, vol. 740, pp. 89–105. Springer, Heidelberg (1993)
Young, A., Yung, M.: A space efficient backdoor in RSA and its applications. In: Preneel, B., Tavares, S. (eds.) SAC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3897, pp. 128–143. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Young, A., Yung, M.: An elliptic curve backdoor algorithm for RSASSA. In: Camenisch, J., Collberg, C.S., Johnson, N.F., Sallee, P. (eds.) IH 2006. LNCS, vol. 4437, pp. 355–374. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Bernstein, D.J.: Proving tight security for Rabin-Williams signatures. In: Smart, N.P. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2008. LNCS, vol. 4965, pp. 70–87. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Bellare, M., Rogaway, P.: Random oracles are practical: A paradigm for designing efficient protocols. In: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 62–73 (1993)
Bellare, M., Rogaway, P.: The exact security of digital signatures - how to sign with RSA and Rabin. In: Maurer, U.M. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1996. LNCS, vol. 1070, pp. 399–416. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Liskov, M.: Constructing an ideal hash function from weak ideal compression functions. In: Biham, E., Youssef, A.M. (eds.) SAC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4356, pp. 358–375. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Fischlin, M., Lehmann, A.: Multi-property preserving combiners for hash functions. In: Canetti, R. (ed.) TCC 2008. LNCS, vol. 4948, pp. 375–392. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Bellare, M., Rogaway, P.: Random oracles are practical: A paradigm for designing efficient protocols (1995), http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mihir/papers/ro.pdf
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Błaśkiewicz, P., Kubiak, P., Kutyłowski, M. (2011). Two-Head Dragon Protocol: Preventing Cloning of Signature Keys. In: Chen, L., Yung, M. (eds) Trusted Systems. INTRUST 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6802. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25283-9_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25283-9_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25282-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25283-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)