An effective defense against first party attacks in public-key algorithms

Abstract

This paper describes a method for assuring that user-generated public and private key pairs are cryptographically strong. This assurance is achieved by limiting the number of attempts a user can make while generating the keys. Since it takes many billions of attempts to generate so-called “weak” keys, with any significant probability of success, our method precludes users from cheating. The described method has a potential positive impact on several evolving cryptographic standards, where the strength of the keys used with public key cryptography are a matter of major concern. It has no negative impact on key generation performance. The method is simple and straightforward, and it can be easily performed with just a few computational steps.