A Study of OSI Key Management

For communications between computer systems to be useful in many environments, the systems and their communications must be secure. One prerequisite to secure communications is the management of keying material needed by the underlying cryptographic mechanisms that provide security. This report... See full abstract

For communications between computer systems to be useful in many environments, the systems and their communications must be secure. One prerequisite to secure communications is the management of keying material needed by the underlying cryptographic mechanisms that provide security. This report addresses key management as it applies to communications protocols based on the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) architecture. It contains a criteria and model of OSI key management that allows schemes based on both secret key and public key cryptography to be incorporated. The report reviews significant issues of OSI key management and presents a generic protocol that resolves a majority of them. The abstract syntax notation (ASN.l) is used to specify the protocol. An example of how registration of ASN.l protocol modules can be used to support algorithm specific security objects is also given.
Hide full abstract