Much confusion exists in terms of what constitutes cryptographic key establishment. Key establishment is simply the act of two parties either agreeing on a specific cryptographic key or acting as sender and receiver roles in the transport of a key from one to the other. More specifically, it is as follows:
- Key agreement is the act of two parties contributing algorithmically to the creation of a shared key. In other words, generated or stored public values from one party are sent to the other (frequently in plaintext) and input into complementary algorithm processes to arrive at a shared secret. This shared secret (in conventional cryptographic best practices) is then input to a key derivation function (frequently hash-based) ...
