Crypto-integrity

Abstract

Designing cryptographic mechanisms and products is a challenging task. This task will become increasingly hard as software technology and systems evolve and as the new computational environment becomes more distributed, more diverse, and more global. In order to enable the inclusion of cryptographic components in the future infrastructure and within future applications, it is argued that assurance of their (secure) operation has to be provided and their robustness has to be exhibited in real time. This assurance, which we call crypto-integrity will guarantee the correct functioning of the cryptographic components in an efficient fashion. This built-in integrity should have no impact on the system security and should have minimal impact on its function, performance and composability. We review the need for crypto-integrity in various known settings, ways to implement it based on known protocol techniques as well as potential future directions. The paper is written as a position paper and not as a survey of the vast relevant literature.