Security and Reliability Analysis

Table of Links

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2. Related Work

   2.1 The Alternative-Authenticator Approach

   2.2 The Original-Authenticator Approach

3. The Proposed Secret Backup Approaches

   3.1 Notations

   3.2 Assumptions

   3.3 The Direct-Escrow Method

   3.4 Our Proposed Algorithms

4. Security and Reliability Analysis

   4.1 Security Analysis

   4.2 Reliability Analysis

   4.3 Recovery Failure Rate Analysis

   4.4 Real World Parameters

   4.5 Failure Rate Optimization of (k,n)

5. Comparison

6. Conclusion, Acknowledgment, and References

Appendix

4 SECURITY AND RELIABILITY ANALYSIS

Both security and reliability are critical measures of any successful secret backup and recovery approach. However, most works consider only security measures. In reality, either the security or the reliability fails, and the recovery fails.

For reliability, we are talking about the probability that an owner can complete the process and truly recover the owned private key when needed. In contrast, security is about the possibility an attacker fails to obtain the owner's private key. Both security and reliability are essential for any recovery approach. In the following, we first separately analyze the security and reliability. Finally, we combine them into a new integrated failure measure and then suggest how to choose parameters for the proposed approach optimally