2022/09/19 by Wei-Hsin Chang, Chang, Wei-Hsin, Ren‐Song Tsay +1
Computer Science · #Advanced Authentication Protocols Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Digital Rights Management and Security #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.09388
openalex publication_date 2022/09/19 · openalex created_date 2022/09/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we propose a very secure and reliable owner-self-managed private key recovery method. In recent years, Public Key Authentication (PKA) method has been identified as the most feasible online security solution. However, losing the private key also implies the risk of losing the ownership of the assets associated with the private key. For key protection, the commonly adopted something-you-x solutions require a new secret to protect the target secret and fall into a circular protection issue as the new secret has to be protected too. To resolve the circular protection issue and provide a truly secure and reliable solution, we propose separating the permission and possession of the private key. Then we create secret shares of the permission using the open public keys of selected trustees while having the owner possess the permission-encrypted private key. Then by applying the social authentication method, one may easily retrieve the permission to recover the private key. Our analysis shows that our proposed indirect-permission method is six orders of magnitude more secure and reliable than