Paper 2013/629

Secure Key Management in the Cloud

Ivan Damgård, Thomas P. Jakobsen, Jesper Buus Nielsen, and Jakob I. Pagter

Abstract

We consider applications involving a number of servers in the cloud that go through a sequence of online periods where the servers communicate, separated by offline periods where the servers are idle. During the offline periods, we assume that the servers need to securely store sensitive information such as cryptographic keys. Applications like this include many cases where secure multiparty computation is outsourced to the cloud, and in particular a number of online auctions and benchmark computations with confidential inputs. We consider fully autonomous servers that switch between online and offline periods without communicating with anyone from outside the cloud, and semi-autonomous servers that need a limited kind of assistance from outside the cloud when doing the transition. We study the levels of security one can - and cannot - obtain in this model, propose light-weight protocols achieving maximal security, and report on their practical performance.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. 14th IMA Conference on Cryptography and Coding (IMA CC 2013)
Keywords
applicationskey managementsecret sharingthreshold cryptography
Contact author(s)
tpj @ cs au dk
History
2013-09-30: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2013/629
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/629,
      author = {Ivan Damgård and Thomas P.  Jakobsen and Jesper Buus Nielsen and Jakob I.  Pagter},
      title = {Secure Key Management in the Cloud},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2013/629},
      year = {2013},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/629}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/629}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.