Projects

Showing 5 matching records.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography ECC

Elliptic curve cryptography is critical to the adoption of strong cryptography as we migrate to higher security strengths. NIST has standardized elliptic curve cryptography for digital signature algorithms in FIPS 186 and for key establishment schemes in SP 800-56A. In FIPS 186-4, NIST recommends fifteen elliptic curves of varying security levels for use in these elliptic curve cryptographic standards. However, more than fifteen years have passed since these curves were first developed, and...

Entropy as a Service EaaS

Cryptography is critical for securing data at rest or in transit over the IoT. But cryptography fails when a device uses easy-to-guess (weak) keys generated from low-entropy random data. Standard deterministic computers have trouble producing good randomness, especially resource-constrained IoT-class devices that have little opportunity to collect local entropy before they begin network communications. The best sources of true randomness are based on unpredictable physical phenomena, such as...

Key Management

Publications that discuss the generation, establishment, storage, use and destruction of the keys used NIST’s cryptographic algorithms Project Areas: Key Management Guidelines Key Establishment Cryptographic Key Management Systems Generally-speaking, there are two types of key establishment techniques: 1) techniques based on asymmetric (public key) algorithms, and 2) techniques based on symmetric (secret key) algorithms. However, hybrid techniques are also commonly used, whereby public...

Multi-Party Threshold Cryptography MPTC

The multiparty paradigm of threshold cryptography enables a secure distribution of trust in the operation of cryptographic primitives. This can apply, for example, to the operations of key generation, signing, encryption and decryption. This project focuses on threshold schemes for cryptographic primitives: using a “secret sharing” mechanism, the secret key is split across multiple "parties", such that, even if some (up to a threshold f out of n) of these parties are corrupted, the key secrecy...

Pairing-Based Cryptography

Recently, what are known as “pairings” on elliptic curves have been a very active area of research in cryptography. A pairing is a function that maps a pair of points on an elliptic curve into a finite field. Their unique properties have enabled many new cryptographic protocols that had not previously been feasible. In particular, identity-based encryption (IBE) is a pairing-based scheme that has received considerable attention. IBE uses some form of a person (or entity’s) identification to...