Survey and Taxonomy of Key Management Protocols for Wired and Wireless Networks

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to survey the key management protocols for wired and wireless networks and study their security aspects in terms of key generation, agreement and distribution. The central research challenge is exhaustive survey of secure and efficient key management protocols. In this survey, it is shown that all these protocols could be placed under one of two key management protocol categories: (i) peer to peer communication and (ii) group communication. This can also be analyzed that peer to peer key management can be classified as: (i) symmetric key, (ii) asymmetric key and (iii) hybrid key management protocols and group communication can further be classified as: (i) Diffie-Hellman based (ii)Hybrid key management. We can say that our theoretical and execution analysis of protocols emphasise various observations that can motivate researchers in key management issues of networks.