Cryptosystems Robust against “Dynamic Faults” Meet Enterprise Needs for Organizational “Change Control”

Abstract

Business organizations are dynamic, thus they must have sufficient flexibility in expectation of future structural changes (change in personnel, policies, internal reorganizations, external restructuring, etc.). This issue is becoming increasingly important in recent years since nowadays firms operate in a more dynamic and flexible business environ- ment. As automation progresses, it is expected that cryptography will become a major control tool in organizations. Here we discuss what cryp- tography can provide to enable and manage this business environment of mutating organizations. The main thesis we put forth is the following: “Cryptographic designs traditionally concerned with mechanistic fault tolerance, in which faults are dynamic can, in turn, be the base for a ‘flexible design for control functions' in today's business environment.”

We show how combining various key management techniques which are robust against “dynamic faults” with proper semantically rich “enter- prise view management techniques” - provides a flexible enterprise cryp- tographic control. Such control can anticipate dynamic changes of the business entity. We demonstrate how to manage group entities which are either visible externally (using modified certification technology) as well as entities whose internal workings are hidden (using certification tech- nology and proactive protocol technology when extended to withstand failing and rejoining elements).