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Modeling Computational Security in Long-Lived Systems, Version 2

Authors:
Ran Canetti
Ling Cheung
Dilsun Kaynar
Nancy Lynch
Olivier Pereira
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URL: http://eprint.iacr.org/2008/492
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Abstract: For many cryptographic protocols, security relies on the assumption that adversarial entities have limited computational power. This type of security degrades progressively over the lifetime of a protocol. However, some cryptographic services, such as timestamping services or digital archives, are long-lived in nature; they are expected to be secure and operational for a very long time (i.e. super-polynomial). In such cases, security cannot be guaranteed in the traditional sense: a computationally secure protocol may become insecure if the attacker has a super-polynomial number of interactions with the protocol. This paper proposes a new paradigm for the analysis of long-lived security protocols. We allow entities to be active for a potentially unbounded amount of real time, provided they perform only a polynomial amount of work per unit of real time. Moreover, the space used by these entities is allocated dynamically and must be polynomially bounded. We propose a new notion of long-term implementation, which is an adaptation of computational indistinguishability to the long-lived setting. We show that long-term implementation is preserved under polynomial parallel composition and exponential sequential composition. We illustrate the use of this new paradigm by analyzing some security properties of the long-lived timestamping protocol of Haber and Kamat.
BibTeX
@misc{eprint-2008-18148,
  title={Modeling Computational Security in Long-Lived Systems, Version 2},
  booktitle={IACR Eprint archive},
  keywords={foundations /},
  url={http://eprint.iacr.org/2008/492},
  note={ olivier.pereira@uclouvain.be 14206 received 23 Nov 2008},
  author={Ran Canetti and Ling Cheung and Dilsun Kaynar and Nancy Lynch and Olivier Pereira},
  year=2008
}