Re: Timed-release crypto - Proactive security plug

[Amir Herzberg <amir@watson.ibm.com>]

A small note/plug: the schemes by Tim and Michael are based on `long lived'
secret sharing, i.e. you trust each share of your secret to a server for a
really long time. Some people may be concerned that such a long time would
allow an attacker to break into most servers and reconstruct the secret (key).

A solution to this is proactive secret sharing, as described in [HJKY95].
In this protocol, the secret shares are periodically refreshed (i.e. new
shares are computed distributively and then the old shares are erased).
In this manner, an attacker has to break into most servers during the same
period; shares from one period are worthless on the next period.

Best, Amir

[HJKY95] `Proactive Secret Sharing', A. Herzberg, H. Krawczyk, S. Jareski,
M. Yung, Crypto 95.

> At 12:09 AM 11/7/95, Michael Shields wrote:
>
> >In the May proposal, when you have a message to be encrypted, you
> >encrypt it with a session key, optionally split that key with an n-of-m
> >scheme, and then send the key into a network of escrow agents, which are
> >instructed to hold the message for a given period of time.  You then
> >hold onto the encrypted message, though you need not keep it secret.
> >Conceptually, you have encrypted a message and then remailed the key to
> >yourself in such a way that it will take X length of time to arrive.
>

> --Tim May
>
> Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government.

How do you know that?   :-)