Threshold Password-Hardening Updatable Oblivious Key Management

Abstract

We propose a threshold password-hardening updatable oblivious key management system dubbed TPH-UOKM for cloud storage. In TPH-UOKM, a group of key servers share a user-specific secret key for a user, and assist the user in producing her/his password-derived private key in a threshold and oblivious way, where the password is hardened to resist offline dictionary guessing attacks. Anyone can outsource data protected with the user’s password-derived public key to the cloud server, and merely the user holding the correct password can recover the password-derived private key for data access. TPH-UOKM can accomplish decryption of N ciphertexts with the complexity $O(1)$ of communication between a user and the key servers, which outperforms existing schemes. TPH-UOKM supports password update. The cloud server can update all protected data of a user with an update token to be accessible only with the new password, which resists password leakage. We present a two-level proactivization mechanism to periodically update user-specific secret key shares and the key servers to thwart perpetual compromise of them, where the renewal of user-specific secret key shares reduces computation and communication costs compared to existing approaches. Provable security and high efficiency of TPH-UOKM are demonstrated by comprehensive analyses and performance evaluations.