Use Cases

The generic use case of PVSS is to create a secure and durable backup of some highly valuable information.

Offline backup for cryptographic keys

Many applications utilize public-key cryptography and require a private key for their operation. Examples are Certificate Authorities, SSH clients, email users and web servers.

If a private key is disclosed, a lot of damage can be done, e.g. issuing false certificates, signing into SSH servers, faking email signatures or impersonating a web application to intercept data. That means that private keys must be kept private. One approach is to store the key on some Hardware Security Module which will carry out the cryptographic operations but won’t allow to create a copy of the key.

On the other hand, private keys must stay available. Through hardware defects or human mistakes a private key can be easily destroyed, meaning one can no longer issue new certificates, logon to a SSH server, sign or decrypt emails or operate the web server.

For web servers, there is a trivial solution: If the private key is disclosed, revoke its certificate. If the key is destroyed, simply create a new private key and issue a new certificate.

For the other use cases, there is no easy solution. But the next best thing is PVSS:

When generating a new private key, PVSS is used to create a random secret. The private key is encrypted symmetrically with this secret, e.g. with AES-GCM. The random secret is split among \(n\) semi-trusted users. It is defined that any \(1 \lt t \lt n\) of those users can cooperate to reassemble the secret.

Once access to the private key is needed, a special receiver user is created. \(t\) of the users need to re-encrypt their key shares with the receiver’s public key. Only the receiver can then reassemble and decrypt the private key. The key could be stored directly into some HSM and then wiped from the receiver’s memory.

Backup of arbitrary data

Similarly, arbitrary data can be backupped securely. For each new backup job, PVSS is used to create and split a new random secret which is used to symmetrically encrypt (e.g. AES-GCM) the backupped data. The encrypted data (along with the PVSS files) is then stored with high durability in mind.

For restoring the data, any \(1 \lt t \lt n\) of the users cooperate to reassemble the secret key.