The College of Education for Pure Sciences, Department of Computer Science, reviewed a master's thesis on a blockchain-based scheme for distributing key management. The thesis, submitted by researcher Sarah Ya'rub Abdul-Ridha, focused on a decentralized approach to public key management. The importance of this work lies in addressing the problems inherent in traditional key management, which is vulnerable to attacks and lacks flexibility. The proposed scheme relies on storing user keys within transactions on the blockchain to ensure transparency and prevent tampering. Key management refers to a set of processes and techniques used to create, distribute, store, and manage encryption keys. Strong encryption technology ensures the efficient and secure execution of these key management procedures. Key management techniques facilitate data integrity and confidentiality by generating deployable session keys to encrypt all exchanged messages. Unfortunately, most traditional key management methods face numerous challenges that render them ineffective. For example, centralized key management presents a single point of failure, including denial-of-service attacks, low efficiency, and a lack of scalability. Distributed key management, on the other hand, uses centralized entities to distribute keys, which can lead to trust issues and security vulnerabilities. In light of this, we present a decentralized key management system using blockchain technology and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). In the proposed protocol, users' public keys are stored as transactional blockchains while ECC is deployed to secure communication between clients and blockchain servers. A comprehensive formal security analysis using SVO logic was conducted to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed protocol. Furthermore, an informal security analysis shows that the developed protocol mitigates several security threats, such as replays and identity theft. In terms of performance, we demonstrate that the proposed system has relatively lower operating costs.







