Title
Reliability analysis for cryptographic key management
Abstract
The main duty of key management is to keep cryptographic keys in secret. However, it is difficulty to quantitatively assess that how well does a key management scheme protect the keys. In this paper, we propose to use reliability theory, which was mainly used to evaluate performance persistence for engineering systems, to estimate the performance of key management schemes. The reliability analysis leads to counter-intuitive results such as the widely deployed periodic key update scheme is ineffective when key thefts are possible. The analysis also shows that using password with an electronic security token for authentication is a strong security measure in the beginning but is unreliable in the long run. In general, the reliability analysis demonstrates that current key management schemes focus too much on postponing the first key theft from occurring but lack of considerations on quickly recovering stolen keys. In the later part of this paper, we discuss possible directions that may improve the reliability of key management schemes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/ICC.2014.6883450
ICC
Keywords
Field
DocType
cryptographic key management,stolen keys,private key cryptography,reliability analysis,engineering systems,electronic security token,authentication,telecommunication network management,counter-intuitive results,periodic key update scheme,reliability theory,key management scheme,key thefts,availability,reliability engineering
Key distribution,Key management,Key generation,Static key,Key exchange,Computer science,Computer security,Computer network,Public-key cryptography,Cryptographic key types,Key (cryptography)
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1550-3607
0
0.34
References 
Authors
13
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sheng Xiao1173.23
Weibo Gong23225250.70
Don Towsley3186931951.05
Qingquan Zhang402.70
Ting Zhu521412.32