Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures

Chapter 7. Key Management Mechanisms

Key management is a fundamental part of protecting Internet multimedia applications such as VoIP. At the same time, key management protocols are difficult to design, especially for multimedia applications that require group participation (for example, videoconferencing, broadcasting or multicast audio, video or file transfer). Until recently, various key-exchange mechanisms such as IKE were proven to support asynchronous communications (that is, file transfer) but were not suitable for group or multicast Internet multimedia applications. Therefore, a distinct effort has been initiated within the IETF to establish such capability. The IETF RFC 4046, “MSEC Group Key Management Architecture,” defines an architecture ...