Key Distribution for Heterogeneous Public-Key Cryptosystems

The widespread use of cryptographic technologies is complicated by inconsistencies and duplication in the key management systems supporting their applications. The proliferation of key management systems or protocols also results in higher operational and infrastructure costs, and fails in interoperability. Thus, it is essential to realize key management interoperability between different and heterogeneous cryptosystems. This paper presents a practical and separable key management system for heterogeneous public-key cryptosystems. We achieve the interoperability between different cryptosystems via cryptography approaches rather than communication protocols. With our scheme, each client can freely use any kind of cryptosystemthat it likes. The proposed scheme has two advantages over the key management interoperability protocol introduced by the organization for the advancement of structured information standards. One is that all the related operations do not involve the communication protocol and thus no special restrictions are taken on the client devices. The other is that the proposed scheme does not suffer from single-point fault and bottleneck problems.