Self-escrowed public-key infrastructures

Abstract

This paper introduces a cryptographic paradigm called self-escrowed encryption, a concept initiated by kleptography. In simple words, a self-escrowed public-key cryptosystem features the property that the scheme's public and private keys are connected to each other by the mean of an other cryptosystem, called the master scheme. We apply this notion to the design of auto-recoverable auto-certifiable cryptosystems, a solution to software key escrow due to Young and Yung, and provide a new cryptographic escrow system called self-escrowed public key infrastructure. In addition, we give an example of such a system based on ElGamal and Paillier encryption schemes which achieves a high level of both efficiency and security.