[hiprg] draft-zhang-hip-hierarchical-parameter-00: Including hieararchy in HIT generation

[Tobias Heer <[e-mail]>]

Hi!

I just wanted to clarify my comment in the HIPRG meeting on including  
the hierarchy in the HIT creation process. I think it would be good to  
have the hierarchy information in the HIT creation process because the  
hierarchy will be bound to the HIT itself.

Below I briefly sketched a possible way of including it without  
revealing the hierarchy to all hosts.

HIT generation could work like this:

1. Pick random secret X

2. H(Hierarchy, X) => HTag

3. H(PubKey, ..., HTag) => HIT (Orchid)

--> Only use LTag if you do not want to reveal hierarchy.
--> Use hierarchy and X if you want to reveal the hierarchy.

The random secret X prevents dictionary attacks on a limited number of  
hierarchies. H is a hash function. Of course, you should not only use  
H for generating the HIT (step 3) but use the regular way defined in  
the RFCs. If you want to avoid that people can try many instances of X  
for creating many different HITs you can also make X depend on the  
public key, which will make creating many different HITs notably more  
complex.

Best regards,

Tobias



-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Tobias Heer, Ph.D. Student
Distributed Systems Group
RWTH Aachen University, Germany
tel: [phone]
web: http://ds.cs.rwth-aachen.de/members/heer