How to handle encryption key conflicts when synchronizing data?
- by Rafael
Assume that there is data that gets synchronized between several devices. The data is protected with a symmetric encryption algorithm and a key. The key is stored on each device and encrypted with a password. When a user changes the password only the key gets re-encrypted.
Under normal circumstances, when there is a good network connection to other peers, the current key gets synchronized and all data on the new device gets encrypted with the same key.
But how to handle situations where a new device doesn’t have a network connection and e.g. creates its own new, but incompatible key? How to keep the usability as high as possible under such circumstances?
The application could detect that there is no network and hence refuse to start. That’s very bad usability in my opinion, because the application isn’t functional at all in this case. I don’t consider this a solution.
The application could ignore the missing network connection and create a new key. But what to do when the application gains a network connection? There will be several incompatible keys and some parts of the underlying data could only be encrypted with one key and other parts with another key.
The situation would get worse if there would be more keys than just two and the application would’ve to ask every time for a password when another object that should get decrypted with another key would be needed.
It is very messy and time consuming to try to re-encrypt all data that is encrypted with another key with a main key. What should be the main key at all in this case? The oldest key? The key with the most encrypted objects? What if the key got synchronized but not all objects that got encrypted with this particular key? How should the user know for which particular password the application asks and why it takes probably very long to re-encrypt the data? It’s very hard to describe encryption “issues” to users.
So far I didn’t find an acceptable solution, nor some kind of generic strategy. Do you have some hints about a concrete strategy or some books / papers that describe synchronization of symmetrically encrypted data with keys that could cause conflicts?
