Practical solutions to key recovery based on PKI in IP security

Abstract

IPSec is a security protocol suite that provides encryption and authentication services for IP messages at the network layer of the Internet. Key recovery has been the subject of a lot of discussion, of much controversy and of extensive research. Key recovery, however, might be needed at a corporate level, as a form of key management. The basic observation of the present paper is that cryptographic solutions that have been proposed so far completely ignore the communication context. We propose example to provide key recovery capability by adding key recovery information to an IP datagram. It is possible to take advantage of the communication environment in order to design key recovery protocols that are better suited and more efficient.