Crypto management made manageable — Demands on crypto equipment design

Abstract

Encryption is a very useful method for data protection, but its use is often made unnecessarily difficult by products which are not adjusted to common situations in the real world. Products should be highly modularized, with encryption/decryption, key management and protocol-dependent adjustments clearly kept apart. Then products can be further refined to meet specific customer demands on physical security, encrypted communications between “dumb” and “intelligent” terminals and nodes, true end-to-end encryption in complicated networks, etc. All this is necessary if encryption is ever to be of real use in the computer world.