RSA Security 5.2.2 manual Process of having a third party hold onto encryption keys

identification

A process through which one ascertains the identity of another person or entity.

key

A string of bits used widely in cryptography, allowing people to encrypt and decrypt data; a key can be used to perform other mathematical operations as well. Given a cipher, a key determines the mapping of the plaintext to the ciphertext. See also distributed key, private key, public key, secret key, session key, shared key, sub key, symmetric key, weak key.

key agreement

A process used by two or more parties to agree upon a secret symmetric key.

key escrow

The process of having a third party hold onto encryption keys.

key exchange

A process used by two more parties to exchange keys in cryptosystems.

key expansion

A process that creates a larger key from the original key.

key generation

The act of creating a key.

key management

The various processes that deal with the creation, distribution, authentication, and storage of keys.

key pair

The full key information in a public-key cryptosystem, consisting of the public key and private key.

key recovery

A special feature of a key management scheme that allows messages to be decrypted even if the original key is lost.

key schedule

An algorithm that generates the subkeys in a block cipher.

key space

The collection of all possible keys for a given cryptosystem. See also flat key space, linear key space, nonlinear key space, and reduced key space.

Message Authentication Code (MAC)

A MAC is a function that takes a variable length input and a key to produce a fixed-length output. See also hash-based MAC, stream-cipher based MAC, and block-cipher based MAC.

message digest

The result of applying a hash function to a message.

MIME

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.

MIPS

Millions of Instructions Per Second. A measurement of computing speed.

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