A Study of Key Management for Encrypted Storage in Storage Area Network

Abstract

As secure storage becomes more pervasive throughout the enterprise, the focus quickly moves from implementing encrypting storage devices to establishing effective and secure key management policies. Without the proper key generation, distribution, storage, and recovery, valuable data will be eventually compromised [9]. Although a considerable amount of research has been dedicated to encryption algorithms in the past decades, key management becomes an issue due to the quantity of data. For example, with millions of data you will need million set of keys. To manage and keep track of these keys, complexity and operational inefficiency becomes an issue. How to manage keys becomes a challenging task. Adequate understanding of these new challenges is essential to effectively devise new key management policies and mechanisms to guard against them. We discuss many of these methods in this new context to fill this gap.