The puzzle theorem - The less I know, the less I can disclose ...

This paper presents an architecture designed to improve the efficiency of secure protocols by apportioning keys. It enable the handling of 'partially trusted' hosts set in a networking environment. It is also designed to manage complex keys with 'virtual smartcards'. Access through several objects (users, processes...) requires a specified amount of trusted severs before being granted. It is based on the notion of 'key apportion' or 'fragmentation and dissemination' [iii]. This architecture is applied to the Kerberos protocol to solve the problem of storing all information at one sensible point: the Key Server.