Key management with minimized secret storage employing an erasure channel approach

Abstract

In this letter, the problem of minimizing the amount of secret information (secret bits) required for certain key management schemes related to data access control techniques is addressed. The importance of secret storage minimization originates from the fact that this storage should be both read-proof and tamper-proof. The proposed approach intends to minimize the protected (secret) storage by introducing public storage in conjunction with an efficient one-way mapping of the secret bits in the exchange of information from private to public storage. This method achieves reduction of the secret storage overhead at the user's side and provides an appropriate tradeoff between the reduced private storage, and the required public storage and associated processing complexity. The method is applied to the minimization of the secret storage required by two recently proposed key management schemes, and the overheads of the modified schemes are compared with the related previously reported ones, pointing out the advantages of the novel approach.