|
On Generating the Initial Key
in the Bounded-Storage Model
Available files: [
Postscript ] [
PDF ] [ BibTeX]
[ Slides-PDF
]
[ Slides-PS
] Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT '04, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, May 2004. Abstract In the bounded-storage model (BSM) for information-theoretically secure encryption and key-agreement one uses a random string R whose length t is greater than the assumed bound s on the adversary Eve s storage capacity. The
legitimate parties Alice and Bob share a short initial secret key K
which they use to select and combine certain bits of R to
obtain a derived key X which is much longer than K. Eve
can be proved to obtain essentially no information about X even
if she has infinite computing power and even if she learns K
after having performed the storage operation and lost access to R.This paper addresses the problem of generating the
initial key K
and makes two contributions. First, we prove that without such a key,
secret key agreement in the BSM is impossible unless Alice and Bob have
themselves very high storage capacity, thus proving the optimality of a
scheme proposed by Cachin and Maurer. Second, we investigate the hybrid
model where K is generated by a computationally secure key
agreement protocol. The motivation for the hybrid model is to achieve
provable security under the sole assumption that Eve cannot break the
key agreement scheme during the storage phase, even if
afterwards she may gain infinite computing power (or at least be able
to break the key agreement scheme). In earlier work on the BSM, it was
suggested that such a hybrid scheme is secure because if Eve has no
information about K during the storage phase, then she has
missed any opportunity to know anything about X, even when
later learning K.
We show that this very intuitive and apparently correct reasoning is
false by giving an example of a secure (according to the standard
definition) computational key-agreement scheme for which the BSM-scheme
is nevertheless completely insecure. One of the surprising consequences
of this example is that existing definitions for the computational
security of key-agreement and encryption are still too weak and
therefore new, stronger definitions are needed.
|