A Proposal of Key Recovery Mechanism for Personal Decryptographic Keys

Encryption technology is a very effective mean for companies, organizations and persons to protect their important data. We have so many keys to decrypt our data, which are called personal decryptographic keys here. If the personal decryptographic keys are lost, any data cannot be able to be decrypted and the important data are lost. But, up to now, a key recovery system is usually used in the business world, but isn`t used for persons. Therefore, in this paper, we have proposed a key recovery mechanism for individuals, which uses both a public key cryptosystem and a master key. At first, a data owner divides his/hers personal decryptographic key into several fragments, then, uses the public key cryptosystem to encrypt these fragments. After then, the owner sends each encrypted fragment to different key escrow agent. At the same time, the owner uses the master key to control the encryptographic keys. When the owner loses the personal decryptographic key, the owner can obtain fragments from the key escrow agents and recover the personal decryptographic key by using the fragments and the master key.