Virtual Vault: A Practical Leakage Resilient Scheme Using Space-Hard Ciphers

Yuji KOIKE  Takuya HAYASHI  Jun KURIHARA  Takanori ISOBE  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E104-A    No.1    pp.182-189
Publication Date: 2021/01/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.2020CIP0026
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Cryptography and Information Security)
Category: 
Keyword: 
leakage-resilient scheme,  space-hard cipher,  block cipher,  space hardness,  network monitoring,  

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Summary: 
Due to the legal reform on the protection of personal information in US/Japan and the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, service providers are obliged to more securely manage the sensitive data stored in their server. In order to protect this kind of data, they generally employ a cryptographic encryption scheme and secure key management schemes such as a Hardware Security Module (HSM) and Trusted Platform Module (TPM). In this paper, we take a different approach based on the space-hard cipher. The space-hard cipher has an interesting property called the space hardness. Space hardness guarantees sufficient security against the adversary who gains a part of key data, e.g., 1/4 of key data. Combined with a simple network monitoring technique, we develop a practical leakage resilient scheme Virtual Vault, which is secure against the snapshot adversary who has full access to the memory in the server for a short period. Importantly, Virtual Vault is deployable by only a low-price device for network monitoring, e.g. L2 switch, and software of space-hard ciphers and packet analyzer, while typical solutions require a dedicated hardware for secure key managements such as HSM and TPM. Thus, Virtual Vault is easily added on the existing servers which do not have such dedicated hardware.