EFFICIENT DISTRIBUTION OF COMPUTATION IN KEY AGREEMENT

• Main Author: FERGUSON NIELS THOMAS
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 02.12.2010
• Subjects: ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE; ELECTRICITY; TRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHICCOMMUNICATION

In Transport Layer Security (TLS) or other communication protocols, the load on the server may be lowered by reducing the number of expensive decryption operations that the server has to perform. When a client contacts a server, the client sends the server the client's public key. The server chooses a secret value, encrypts the value with the client's public key, and sends the encrypted value to the client. When the client decrypts the secret, the server and client share a secret value, which may be used to derive an encryption key for further messages. In many key agreement schemes, the client chooses and encrypts the secret value, and the server recovers the value with an expensive decryption operation. By instead having the server choose the value and send it to the client, an expensive decryption operation is redistributed from the server to the client, thereby freeing server resources.