Provable Partial Key Escrow

In this paper we first propose two new concepts concerning the notion of key escrow schemes: provable partiality and independence. Roughly speaking, a scheme has provable partiality if the existence of a polynomial time for recovering the secret from escrowed information implies there is a polynomial time algorithm for solving a well known intractable problem. A scheme is independent if the secret key and the escrowed information are independent. Finally, we propose a new verifiable partial key escrow scheme, based on McCurley’s encryption scheme, satisfying both of the above criteria.