Abstract
According to standard fiction, a user is able to securely keep long term keys on his device. However, in fact his device may become infected with malware, and an adversary may obtain a copy of his key. We propose an attacker model in which devices are “periodically trustworthy” — they may become infected by malware, and then later become trustworthy again after software patches and malware scans have been applied, in an ongoing cycle. This paper proposes a solution to make the usage of private keys by attackers detectable by using public transparently-maintained logs to monitor the usage of long-term secret keys.
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Notes
- 1.
The period is the lifetime of the generated S. It will be denoted as \(\delta \) in the security discussion section. The smaller the \(\delta \), the more secure the system is.
- 2.
Note that m could be any sensitive data, such as a session key which will be used to encrypt messages in this communication.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Ross Anderson, Daniel Thomas, and all other attendees of International Workshop on Security Protocols for their comments and discussions. Jiangshan Yu is supported by the EPSRC project EP/H005501/1.
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Yu, J., Ryan, M.D. (2015). Device Attacker Models: Fact and Fiction. In: Christianson, B., Švenda, P., Matyáš, V., Malcolm, J., Stajano, F., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXIII. Security Protocols 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26096-9_17
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