Certificates of recoverability with scalable recovery agent security

Abstract

We propose new schemes for Certificates of Recoverability (CRs). These consist of a user's public key and attributes, its private key encrypted in such a way that it is recoverable by one or more Key Recovery Agents (KRAs), plus a publicly verifiable proof of this (the actual CR). In the original schemes, the level of cryptographic security employed by the KRA and the users is necessarily the same. In our schemes the level of cryptographic security employed by the KRA can be set higher, in a scalable fashion, than that being employed by the users. Among the other improvements of our schemes are its applicability to create CRs for cryptosystems based on the Discrete Log problem in small subgroups, most notably the Digital Signature Standard and Elliptic Curve Crypto systems. Also, the size of the constructed proofs of knowledge can be taken smaller than in the original schemes. We additionally show several ways to support secret sharing in our scheme. Finally we present several new constructions and results on the hardness of “small parts”, in the setting of Diffie-Hellman keys in extension fields.