Cryptographic key recovery

Internet/Intranet security has witnessed an explosive and exciting growth in the past two years. Under the surface of excitement lies a mine of technical and commercial challenges. Without solving these challenges, secure systems will not reach the expected potential. Security can be achieved via encryption. Encryption uses ''keys'' to encrypt and decrypt the information. Without having the cryptographic key, the ciphered information will never be converted into its original text. In case of key loss or damage or forgetting the key password; there should be a mechanism to recover the cryptographic keys and decipher the encrypted information. This paper describes a key recovery mechanism to facilitate the recovery of encryption keys and encrypted data. The mechanism does not require keys to be escrowed. It is based on adding an extra, small, field - Key Recovery Entry (KRE) to a message or file being transmitted. This mechanism facilitates key recovery for both session-keys in symmetric cryptographic system, and private keys in the asymmetric cryptographic systems without any need to escrow any key information. The author makes the differentiation between key escrow and key recovery.