Security Amplification Through Data Splitting: Achieving High Security Using Moderately Secure Hardware

For this project, we will research novel data-splitting techniques that can be used on COTS hardware to achieve similar effects as a specialized security processor, without relying upon expensive cryptographic operations. This is achieved through the technique of data splitting, and the use of k copies of the same moderately secure COTS hardware (where k is at least 2, and can be increased to increase the resulting security). If the probability of compromise of the data in the COTS hardware is p, then the probability of compromise of the proposed system is p^k because it is now necessary to completely compromise every one of the k copies to obtain the secret encryption keys or otherwise compromise the secret data.