Publications Details
Proactive DSA application and implementation
Data authentication as provided by digital signatures is a well known technique for verifying data sent via untrusted network links. Recent work has extended digital signatures to allow jointly generated signatures using threshold techniques. In addition, new proactive mechanisms have been developed to protect the joint private key over long periods of time and to allow each of the parties involved to verify the actions of the other parties. In this paper, the authors describe an application in which proactive digital signature techniques are a particularly valuable tool. They describe the proactive DSA protocol and discuss the underlying software tools that they found valuable in developing an implementation. Finally, the authors briefly describe the protocol and note difficulties they experienced and continue to experience in implementing this complex cryptographic protocol.