Key management

Even an excellent safe cannot protect against a thief who knows the combination. Even an excellent cipher cannot protect against an enemy who knows the key.

Many cryptographic techniques — block ciphers, stream ciphers, public key encryption, digital signatures, and hashed message authentication codes — depend on cryptographic keys. None of these can be secure if the key is not. Enemies can sometimes read encrypted messages without breaking the cipher; they use practical cryptanalysis techniques such as breaking into an office to steal keys.

The size and the quality of keys are almost as important as their secrecy. Keys need to be large enough and highly random; those two properties together make them effectively impossible to guess. A key that an enemy can easily guess, or that he can find with a low-cost search, does not provide much protection. Using strong cryptography with a poor key is like buying good locks then leaving the key under the doormat. See cryptographic key and random number generator for details.

In applications which encrypt a large volume of data, any cipher must be re-keyed from time to time to prevent an enemy from accumulating large amounts of data encrypted with a single key. Such a collection facilitates some attacks — see code book attack, linear cryptanalysis and differential cryptanalysis in particular, and cryptanalysis in general. It also makes the payoff for breaking that key very large. Re-keying also limits the damage if a key is compromised in some other way. Ciphers generally do not include a re-keying mechanism; some higher-level protocol manages that and re-keys the cipher using the normal keying mechanism.

In some applications, there are natural breaks where a new session key should be used. For example it is natural to use a different key for each new message in a message-oriented protocol such as email, or for each new connection in a connection-oriented protocol such as SSH for secure remote login. This may be all the re-keying required. Or it may not; what if some users send multi-gigabyte emails or stay logged in for months?

In other applications, a mechanism for periodic re-keying is required. For a VPN connection between two offices, this would normally be the Internet Key Exchange protocol which negotiates new session keys from time to time. For an embassy, it might be a clerk who changes the key daily and an officer who delivers more keys once a month, flying in with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

There are many ways to manage keys, ranging from physical devices and smartcards to cryptographic techniques such as Diffie-Hellman. In some cases, an entire public key infrastructure may be involved.