• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.781-793
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• 2014

A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is security standards to manage and use public key cryptosystem. A PKI is used to provide digital signature, authentication, public key encryption functionality on insecure channel, such as E-banking and E-commerce on Internet. A soft-token private key in PKI is leaked easily because it is stored in a file at standardized location. Also it is vulnerable to a brute-force password attack as is protected by password-based encryption. In this paper, we proposed a new method that detects private key compromise and is probabilistically secure against a brute-force password attack though soft-token private key is leaked. The main idea of the proposed method is to use a genuine signature key pair and (n-1) fake signature key pairs to make an attacker difficult to generate a valid signature with probability 1/n even if the attacker found the correct password. The proposed method provides detection and notification functionality when an attacker make an attempt at authentication, and enhances the security of soft-token private key without the additional cost of construction of infrastructure thereby extending the function of the existing PKI and SSL/TLS.