Asynchronous proactive cryptosystems without agreement (extended abstract)

Abstract

In this paper, we present efficient asynchronous protocols that allow to build proactive cryptosystems secure against a mobile fail-stop adversary. Such systems distribute the power of a public-key cryptosy stem among a set of servers, so that the security and functionality of the overall system is preserved against an adversary that crashes and/or eavesdrops every server repeatedly and transiently, but no more than a certain fraction of the servers at a given time. The building blocks of proactive cryptosystems -to which we present novel solutions -are protocols for joint random secret sharing and for proactive secret sharing. The first protocol provides every server with a share of a random value unpredictable by the adversary, and the second allows to change the shared representation of a secret value. Synchronous protocols for these tasks are well-known, but the standard method for adapting them to the asynchronous model requires an asynchronous agreement sub-protocol. Our solutions are more efficient as they go without such an agreement sub-protocol. Moreover, they are the first solutions for such protocols having a bounded worst-case complexity, as opposed to only a bounded average-case complexity. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2004.