KISS: "Key It Simple and Secure" Corporate Key Management

Zongwei Zhou, Jun Han, Yue-Hsun Lin, Adrian Perrig, Virgil D. Gligor

Abstract: Deploying a corporate key management system faces fundamental challenges, such as fine-grained key usage control and secure system administration. None of the current commercial systems (either based on software or hardware security modules) or research proposals adequately address both challenges with small and simple Trusted Computing Base (TCB). This paper presents a new key management architecture, called KISS, to enable comprehensive, trustworthy, user-verifiable, and cost-effective key management. KISS protects the entire life cycle of cryptographic keys. In particular, KISS allows only authorized applications and/or users to use the keys. Using simple devices, administrators can remotely issue authenticated commands to KISS and verify system output. KISS leverages readily available commodity hardware and trusted computing primitives to design system bootstrap protocols and management mechanisms, which protects the system from malware attacks and insider attacks.