[Cryptography] Does this keying scheme make sense?

Tom Mitchell mitch at niftyegg.com
Sun Oct 22 14:04:47 EDT 2017


On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 7:37 PM John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> I was talking to a guy at a conference who sells a package which,
> among other things, encrypts files in cloud storage with each file
> having a different key.  The keys are all generated from a secret
> keystore seed in a way that is supposed to be secure.
>
> I'm looking at his patent on the technique and can't tell whether it's
> clever, or just overclever:


Yes clever.
As I read it he is patenting the problem.  He describes a problem and
appears to wave his hands and claim all solutions to the problem.

So If you store your data in the cloud and solve the problems obvious is
such a cloud based system he can litigate without knowing how it was
solved.  i.e. zero knowledge litigation :)

The crypto involves bits... one or more and seed bits one or more...
Hmmm...

He calls part of it key management and that is a massive issue for clouds
and data in the cloud.
Those with written processes for key management should keep them and
associated dates and authors as defense,  ISO9000 even trade secret stuff
going back for years...

Quantum devices will open a new blank book on this topic... stay tuned.
And the methods discovered by AI as demonstrated by the recent Go
programming breakthrough will further tangle things.  What if an AI
reimplements all or part of a “method”.



-- 
Tinny keyboard.. Mobile ... I am
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