Abstract
The Law Enforcement Agency Field (LEAF), which in Clip- per is appended to the ciphertext, allows the Law Enforcement Agency to trace the sender and receiver. To prevent users of Clipper to delete the LEAF, the Clipper decryption box will not decrypt if the correct LEAF is not present. Such a solution requires the implementation to be tamperproof.
In this paper we propose an alternative approach to achieve traceabil- ity. Our solution is based on the computational complexity of some well known problems in number theory. So, our scheme does not require a tamperproof implementation, nor a secret algorithm. Its applications ex- tend beyond key escrow.
DISCLAIMER: This paper is not intended at all as an endorsement of the Clipper idea or the idea of Key Escrow. The intend of this paper is scientific, i.e., to propose a solution to the open problem whether it is possible to make a software based key escrow system without the need of tamperproofness.
A part of this work has been supported by NSF Grant NCR-9106327. The author is solely responsible for the content of this paper. A part of this research was done while the author was visiting the Università di Salerno, Italy. This visit was supported in part by CNR AI n.94.00011.
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Keywords
- Finite Cyclic Group
- Federal Information Processing Standard
- Digital Signature Standard
- Threshold Decryption
- Subliminal Channel
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Desmedt, Y. (1995). Securing Traceability of Ciphertexts — Towards a Secure Software Key Escrow System. In: Guillou, L.C., Quisquater, JJ. (eds) Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT ’95. EUROCRYPT 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 921. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49264-X_12
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