Abstract
After four decades of public key cryptography, both the industry and academia seek better solutions for the public key infrastructure. A recent proposal, the certificate transparency concept, tries to enable untrusted servers act as public key servers, such that any key owner can verify that her key is kept properly at those servers. Unfortunately, due to high computation and communication requirements, existing certificate transparency proposals fail to address the problem as a whole.
We propose a new efficient key authentication service (KAS). It uses server-side gossiping as the source of trust, and assumes servers are not all colluding. KAS stores all keys of each user in a separate hash chain, and always shares the last ring of the chain among the servers, ensuring the users that all servers provide the same view about them (i.e., no equivocation takes place). Storing users’ keys separately reduces the server and client computation and communication dramatically, making our KAS a very efficient way of public key authentication. The KAS handles a key registration/change operation in O(1) time using only O(1) proof size; independent of the number of users. While the previous best proposal, CONIKS, requires the client to download 100 KB of proof per day, our proposal needs less than 1 KB of proof per key lifetime, while obtaining the same probabilistic guarantees as CONIKS.
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Notes
- 1.
By our assumption that not all providers are colluding, there is at least one non-adversarial provider that the challenger will simulate.
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Acknowledgement
We would like to acknowledge the support of TÜBİTAK, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, under project number 114E487.
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Etemad, M., Küpçü, A. (2015). Efficient Key Authentication Service for Secure End-to-End Communications. In: Au, MH., Miyaji, A. (eds) Provable Security. ProvSec 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9451. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26059-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26059-4_10
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