The\Omega Key Management Service

In this paper we introduce \Omega\Gamma a distributed public key management service for open networks.\Omega offers interfaces by which clients can register, retrieve, and revoke public keys, and escrow, use (to decrypt messages), and recover private keys, all of which can be subjected to access control policy. \Omega is built using multiple servers in a way that ensures its correct operation despite the malicious corruption of fewer than one-third of its component servers. We describe the design of \Omega\Gamma the protocols underlying its operation, performance in our present implementation, and an experimental application of the service. 1 Introduction Key management remains the primary obstacle to the wide-scale use of cryptography. While numerous approaches to key management have been proposed for specific application domains, in our opinion few exhibit sufficient power and flexibility to support the full range of applications emerging today. Solutions relying on an off-line cert..