Technology of protection of authentication data of computer network users

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of perfect protection of authentication data of users of computer systems, especially in the case of a large number of different rights and powers that are personally granted to users. The importance of this problem increases especially when the number of such users in the system is hundreds or thousands. At the same time, each of them must create conditions for access only to their data and ensure protection against any outside interference, both by other users and by staff. A typical example of such conditions are secret electronic voting systems. The software and technical solutions described in this work have passed many years of testing and continue to be practically used in the electronic voting system of the Kyiv National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. This system is regularly used for conducting elections to student self-government bodies and for surveys among students regarding the quality of teaching subjects. With the help of this system, elections of leaders of the Red Cross Society of Ukraine were held during the pandemic, which was associated with the Covid-19 virus. The mathematical basis of the described authentication data protection technology is the theory of algebraic groups, namely, the problem of discrete logarithmization over large Galois fields. Thanks to the use of cryptographic transformations over these fields, instead of known hash functions, it was possible to get rid of the possibility of collisions and neutralize the disclosure of passwords by attackers who were able to do it with the help of specialized Internet resources. It was also possible to increase resistance to brute-force password cracking, since conversions to Galois fields take ten times more time than hash function calculations.