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This paper provides a comprehensive treatment of forwardsecurity in the context of shared-key based cryptographic primitives, as a practical means to mitigate the damage caused by key-exposure. We provide definitions of security, practical proven-secure constructions, and applications for the main primitives in this area. We identify forwardsecure pseudorandom bit generators as the central primitive, providing several constructions and then showing how forward-secure message authentication schemes and symmetric encryption schemes can be built based on standard schemes for these problems coupled with forwardsecure pseudorandom bit generators. We then apply forward-secure message authentication schemes to the problem of maintaining secure access logs in the presence of break-ins.