Mobile device protection from loss and capture

ABSTRACT

Mobile devices play a critical role in assistive environments. How to authenticate and secure communications among them has become more important especially against loss and capture of the devices. In this paper, we present an approach to protect signing keys of mobile devices based on mediated RSA introduced by Dan Boneh and others. The important property of our scheme is transparent self-resilience. In other words, in case a device is lost or captured and at the risk of being compromised and impersonated, our scheme can disable the device instantly and the replacement will be transparent to other users. In this way, if an attacker captures a mobile device, he has limited time to use it because it will become soon invalid. If he wants to break our scheme, he must compromise the device and its mediator simultaneously.

REFERENCES

• 1: Mihir Bellare , Sara K. Miner, A Forward-Secure Digital Signature Scheme, Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.431-448, August 15-19, 1999
• 2: Yigael Berger , Avishai Wool , Arie Yeredor, Dictionary attacks using keyboard acoustic emanations, Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, October 30-November 03, 2006, Alexandria, Virginia, USA [doi>10.1145/1180405.1180436]
• 3: Dan Boneh , Xuhua Ding , Gene Tsudik , Chi Ming Wong, A method for fast revocation of public key certificates and security capabilities, Proceedings of the 10th conference on USENIX Security Symposium, p.22-22, August 13-17, 2001, Washington, D.C.
• 4: Dan Boneh , Matthew Franklin, Efficient generation of shared RSA keys, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.48 n.4, p.702-722, July 2001 [doi>10.1145/502090.502094]
• 5: Mike Burmester , Vassilios Chrissikopoulos , Panayiotis Kotzanikolaou , Emmanouil Magkos, Strong forward security, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Information security: Trusted information: the new decade challenge, June 11-13, 2001, Paris, France
• 6: Ran Canetti, Shai Halevi, and Jonathan Katz. A Forward-Secure Public-Key Encryption Scheme. In Proc. of Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2003, pages 255--271, 2003.
• 7: Yevgeniy Dodis , Jonathan Katz , Shouhuai Xu , Moti Yung, Key-Insulated Public Key Cryptosystems, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques: Advances in Cryptology, p.65-82, May 02, 2002
• 8: Yevgeniy Dodis , Jonathan Katz , Shouhuai Xu , Moti Yung, Strong Key-Insulated Signature Schemes, Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Theory and Practice in Public Key Cryptography: Public Key Cryptography, p.130-144, January 06-08, 2003
• 9: Niv Gilboa, Two Party RSA Key Generation, Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.116-129, August 15-19, 1999
• 10: Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta. How to timestamp a digital document. Journal of Cryptology, 3(2):99--111, 1991.
• 11: Philip MacKenzie , Michael K. Reiter, Delegation of cryptographic servers for capture-resilient devices, Distributed Computing, v.16 n.4, p.307-327, December 2003 [doi>10.1007/s00446-003-0098-4]
• 12: Michael Malkin, Thomas Wu, and Dan Boneh. Experimenting with Shared Generation of RSA keys. In Proc. of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 1999, pages 43--56, 1999.
• 13: Tal Malkin , Daniele Micciancio , Sara K. Miner, Efficient Generic Forward-Secure Signatures with an Unbounded Number Of Time Periods, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques: Advances in Cryptology, p.400-417, May 02, 2002
• 14: John Marchesini, Sean W. Smith, and Meiyuan Zhao. Keyjacking: the surprising insecurity of client-side SSL. Computers & Security, 24(2):109--123, 2005.
• 15: Gene Tsudik. Weak Forward Security in Mediated RSA. In Proc. of Security in Communication Networks, Third International Conference, SCN 2002, pages 45--54, 2002.
• 16: Wen-Guey Tzeng , Zhi-Jia Tzeng, Robust Key-Evolving Public Key Encryption Schemes, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information and Communications Security, p.61-72, December 09-12, 2002

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  E. Data
  E.3 DATA ENCRYPTION

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection

  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services

  J. Computer Applications
  J.3 LIFE AND MEDICAL SCIENCES

Keywords:
assistive environment, authentication, digital signature, forward security, mobile device