The Long-Short-Key Primitive and Its Applications to Key Security

Off late open computing platforms, attackers can often extract sensitive data from a program's stack, heap, or files. To address this problem, it is designed and implemented a new primitive that helps provide better security for ciphers that use keys stored in easily accessible locations. Given a particular symmetric key, approach generates two functions for encryption and decryption: The short-key function uses the original key, while the functionally equivalent long-key version works with an arbitrarily long key derived from the short key. On common PC architectures, such a long key normally does not fit in stack frames or cache blocks, forcing an attacker to search memory space.