PERKS: Persistent and Distributed Key Acquisition for Secure Storage from Passwords

ePrint Report: PERKS: Persistent and Distributed Key Acquisition for Secure Storage from Passwords

Gareth T. Davies, Jeroen Pijnenburg

We investigate how users of instant messaging (IM) services can acquire strong encryption keys to back up their messages and media with strong cryptographic guarantees. Many IM users regularly change their devices and use multiple devices simultaneously, ruling out any long-term secret storage. Extending the end-to-end encryption guarantees from just message communication to also incorporate backups has so far required either some …

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