A comprehensive survey of cryptography key management systems

Abstract

Cryptographic methods have been extensively employed in various systems to address security objectives, such as data confidentiality, authentication, and secure communication, to name a few. Keys are the most critical parts of any cryptographic system safeguarding the whole underlying infrastructure. Based on the underlying algorithm design, there might be various stages of key generation, exchange, and storage to fulfill an algorithm requirement. In this research, we studied cryptographic techniques along with requirements and corresponding key management systems. Having scrutinized best practices, a taxonomy has been proposed for the key management systems based on the algorithm’s requirements, key stages, and applications. This study is a comprehensive literature review on cryptographic key management systems to provide a complete guideline in key management solutions.