Secure storage of encryption keys

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis work was to make a survey of presently existing devices available in the market to store encryption keys; how the hacker intrudes into the device; what are the attacks behind theft of the keys; how can we store encryption keys securely? To achieve this purpose, an overview of the storage devices and attacks made by hackers was acquired through academic books and papers, Internet sites and magazines. Basic cryptography and related algorithms were studied for the purpose of knowing how the encryption key is generated from these algorithms. Under the category of storage devices, USBs (Universal Serial Bus), PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) and Smart Cards were examined. Under the category of attacks on devices, attacks from hackers, attacks from malicious code (Trojan Horses, viruses, worms), attacks from PDAs, attacks from Smart Cards, dictionary attacks and brute force attacks were studied. Based on these requirements we have discussed and analyzed a proposed system to store the encryption keys securely to avoid these attacks.