A Key Generation Model for Improving the Security of Cryptographic Keys

Abstract

Cryptography is a mathematical technique that plays an important role in information security techniques for addressing authentication, interactive proofs, data origination, sender/receiver identity, non-repudiation, secure computation, data integrity and confidentiality, message integrity checking and digital signatures. In public key cryptography, the security of private keys is very importance, for if ever compromised, it can be used to decrypt secret messages. Conventional methods that use textual passwords, graphical passwords and single modal biometric systems that are used to encryption and protect private keys do not provide adequate security due to uses password practices and the very low entropy of chosen passwords. To improve the security of private keys, we propose a novel multifactor key generation algorithm that dynamically regenerate the private key of a user with a significant high overhead that exceeds what an identity attacker can contend with, that meet the current security requirements of any public key algorithm. The proposed encryption algorithm proved to be more secured at protecting private keys than using textual password-based techniques.

Journal of the Nigerian Association of Mathematical Physics, Volume 19 (November, 2011), pp 487 – 492