Key Management System

Overview

Overview

The switches covered in this guide provide support for advanced routing capabilities. Security turns out to be extremely important as complex net­ works and the internet grow and become a part of our daily life and business. This fact forces protocol developers to improve security mechanisms employed by their protocols, which in turn becomes an extra burden for system administrators who have to set up and maintain them. One possible solution to the problem is to centralize the mechanisms used to configure and maintain security information for all routing protocols. The Key Management System (KMS) can carry this burden.

KMS is designed to configure and maintain key chains. A key chain is a set of keys with a timing mechanism for activating and deactivating individual keys. KMS provides specific instances of routing protocols with one or more Send or Accept keys that must be active at the time of a request. A protocol instance is usually an interface on which the protocol is running.

 

Feature

Default

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CLI

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Generating a Key Chain

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Generating a Time-Independent key

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Generating a Time-Dependent key

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Terminology

Key Chain: A key or set of keys assigned for use by KMS-enabled protocols. A key chain may optionally contain the time to activate and deactivate a particular key.

Time-Independent Key: A key that has no activate or deactivate time associated with it. This type of key does not expire, which eliminates the need for a key chain.

Time-Dependent key: a key that has an activate and deactivate time associated with the Accept and Send processes. Time-Dependent keys expire, which means a key chain is needed to keep the assigned protocols supplied with keys.

Key Management System (KMS) Enabled Protocol: A protocol that uses KMS to store authentication key information.

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