The new Nightingale software will be launched as an SDK in June, and will be integrated in many forthcoming RSA products, initially Passage, RSA’s principle research scientist Ari Juels told ComputerWire.
Juels said Nightingale is designed to eliminate the single point of compromise that is present when encrypted data is all stored in the same place, and can be accessed by a potentially insecure server.
If an attacker gets root access to a server, all data accessible by that server is compromised, Juels said. Encryption doesn’t help the single point of compromise problem, because the decryption key is accessible to the server.
The new RSA system requires a Nightingale server and an applet that is downloaded to the client. The Nightingale server sits behind the application server, using only a very limited set of protocols and an encrypted channel to talk to it.
When data is created, the client creates a random string, combines it with the source data and performs a cryptographic function on them together. The encrypted file is stored on the app server and the random string is stored on the Nightingale server.
If a hacker compromises one server, the encrypted data cannot be accessed without the data held in the other server. Only when both elements are combined can the data be decrypted for viewing by authenticated users, Juels said.
Nightingale also offers the ability to compare new data against data that has been stored in the system without decrypting the data, using a complex mathematical function.
Juels said this could be used, for example, to compare a user-entered password against a previously stored password. The stored password would not have to be decrypted to be compared against the user-entered password.
The technology is called secret splitting or secret sharing, Juels said, and can be applied to any static secret. RSA Labs developed the system at first to secure the answers to password-reminder questions for a web site.
But the idea of secret splitting dates back to the 1970s, and has been well-discussed and documented since them, Juels said. He said: Much of the innovation here is simply transforming theory into practice.
In an ideal deployment of Nightingale, Juels said, the Nightingale server would be stored in a different department or network than the app server, which would make it particularly suitable for an outsourced hosted service that could be offered by an ISP or a security service provider such as VeriSign Inc.
Source: Computerwire
