Instructional Leadership, emphasis: K-12 School Leadership (MEd)
Wires that are connected to a computer.

Key Exchange Schemes with Addressable Elements


Description

The technology incorporates addressable physical unclonable functions (PUFs) that complement or replace existing public key infrastructures (PKI). The novel key exchange scheme strengthens methods related to public key infrastructure that is addressable (PKA) in order to complement or replace PKIs. Unlike PKI, this scheme does not require distributed users to store private keys. The PKA is based on the generation of a public key from a private key. In addition, a cryptographic table is loaded onto the network server with a large quantity of random numbers and securely exchanged between the parties. The public keys are a set of instructions that can be shared in non-secure environments. Also, the public keys contain the information necessary to generate the private keys and are only useful to the parties that have access to the cryptographic tables. As part of the public key, a random number is generated and hashed with a password, producing a message digest that is typically 512 bits long. The message digest is used to point to multiple addresses in the cryptographic table and find the private key. The reading of the few bits located at these multiple addresses can generate different instructions to change the way the private keys are extracted. The schemes result in an increased number of possible private keys that can be extracted from each public key, in turn increasing the randomness rate and reducing collision.

Additional information

Patent number and inventor

16/297,438

Bertrand Cambou, Christopher Philabaum, and Donald Telesca.

Potential applications

This technology is designed for use with cryptographic systems and authentication methods.

Benefits and advantages

Hackers are increasingly efficient at breaking private keys PKI. This technology drastically increases entropy (i.e., randomness rate) and protects the cryptographic system. Also, the technology uses a pointer and a reading element to extract a private key from a cryptographic table. The encryption scheme is not based on mathematical equations to generate public and private key pairs that are potentially vulnerable to quantum computers with the Shor algorithm. In addition, a new public key can be generated after each cycle of encryption-decryption, further strengthening the trustworthiness of the protocol.

Case number and licensing status

2017-044

This invention is available for licensing.