A scalable and efficient key escrow model for lawful interception of IDBC-based secure communication

Abstract

Key escrowing is one of the core technologies for the lawful interception (LI) of secure communications in the wired and wireless networks. Although many previous studies on the key escrowing have been done before, they are insufficient to be deployed in practical networks due to conflicts with the LI requirements. Moreover, there is lack of consideration on the LI of ID-based cryptosystem (IDBC)-based secure communication because the interest of the LI was moved to the industries and IDBC has the inherent key escrowing property. However, the inherent property of IDBC cannot prevent 'illegal' eavesdropping of all the communications in the networks from the law enforcement agency with the 'legally' obtained key. Thus, we propose a new key escrow model that satisfies the requirements of LI and overcomes the potential threats of IDBC. Our contributions enable the scalable and efficient key escrowing for the LI of secure one-way and two-pass communication in the mobile networks. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.