The offline private key protocol (OPKP) is a cryptographic protocol to prevent unauthorized access to back up or archive data. The protocol results in a public key that can be used to encrypt data and an offline private key that can later be used to decrypt that data.
The protocol is based on three rules regarding the key. An offline private key should:
- not be stored with the encrypted data (obviously)
- not be kept by the organisation that physically stores the encrypted data, to ensure privacy
- not be stored at the same system as the original data, to avoid the possibility that theft of only the private key would give access to all data at the storage provider; and to avoid that when the key would be needed to restore a backup, the key would be lost together with the data loss that made the restore necessary in the first place
To comply with these rules, the offline private key protocol uses a method of asymmetric key wrapping.
Read more about Offline Private Key Protocol: Security, Operation, See Also
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