Information-theoretically Secure Key insulated encryption: Models, bounds and constructions
Yumiko Hanaoka, Goichiro Hanaoka, Junji Shikata, Hideki Imai · IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics Communications and Computer Sciences · 2004
Computer systems are constantly under attack and illegal access is a constant threat which makes security even more critical. A system can be broken into and secret information, e.g. decryption key, may be exposed, resulting in a total break of the system. Recently, a new framework for the protection against such key exposure problem was suggested and was called, Key-Insulated Encryption (KIE). In our paper, we introduce a novel approach to key insulated cryptosystems that offers provable security without computational assumptions. For the model of Information-Theoretically Secure Key-Insulated Encryption (ISKIE), we show lower bounds on required memory sizes of user, trusted device and sender. Our bounds are all tight as our concrete construction of ISKIE achieves all the bounds. We also extend this concept further by adding an extra property so that any pair of users in the system is able to communicate with each other and still have the same security benefits as the existing KIE based on intractability assumptions. We called this, Dynamic and Mutual Key-Insulated Encryption (DMKIE), and concrete implementations of DMKIE will be shown as well. In the end, we discuss the relationship of DMKIE against Key Predistribution Schemes (KPS) and Broadcast Encryption Schemes (BES), that is, we show that DMKIE can be constructed from either KPS or BES.