Shatter: Using Threshold Cryptography to Protect Single Users with Multiple Devices

Abstract

The average computer user is no longer restricted to one device. They may have several devices and expect their applications to work on all of them. A challenge arises when these applications need the cryptographic private key of the devices' owner. Here the device owner typically has to manage keys manually with a "keychain" app, which leads to private keys being transferred insecurely between devices -- or even to other people. Even with intuitive synchronization mechanisms, theft and malware still pose a major risk to keys. Phones and watches are frequently removed or set down, and a single compromised device leads to the loss of the owner's private key, a catastrophic failure that can be quite difficult to recover from. We introduce Shatter, an open-source framework that runs on desktops, Android, and Android Wear, and performs key distribution on a user's behalf. Shatter uses threshold cryptography to turn the security weakness of having multiple devices into a strength. Apps that delegate cryptographic operations to Shatter have their keys compromised only when a threshold number of devices are compromised by the same attacker. We demonstrate how our framework operates with two popular Android apps (protecting identity keys for a messaging app, and encryption keys for a note-taking app) in a backwards-compatible manner: only Shatter users need to move to a Shatter-aware version of the app. Shatter has minimal impact on app performance, with signatures and decryption being calculated in 0.5s and security proofs in 14s.