Binding ElGamal: A Fraud-Detectable Alternative to Key-Escrow Proposals

We propose a concept for a worldwide information security infrastructure that protects law-abiding citizens, but not criminals, even if the latter use it fraudulently (i.e. when not complying with the agreed rules). It can be seen as a middle course between the inflexible but fraud-resistant KMI-proposal [8] and the flexible but non-fraud-resistant concept used in TIS-CKE [2]. Our concept consists of adding binding data to the latter concept, which will not prevent fraud by criminals but makes it P t least detectable by third parties without the need of any secret information. In [19], we depict a worldwide framework in which this concept could present a security tool that is flexible enough to be incorporated in any national cryptography policy, on both the domestic and foreign use of cryptography. Here, we present a construction for binding data for ElGamal type public key encryption schemes. As a side result we show that a particular simplification in a multiuser version of ElGamal does not affect its security.