Mikey

Mikey

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This article is about a key management protocol. For the bassist, see Mikey Way. For the Life cereal kid, see Little Mikey.

Multimedia Internet KEYing (MIKEY) is a key management protocol that is intended for use with real-time applications. It can specifically be used to set up encryption keys for multimedia sessions that are secured using SRTP.

MIKEY is defined in RFC 3830.

[edit] Basic Key Transport and Exchange Methods

MIKEY supports three different methods to set up a key:

• pre-shared key (PSK): This is the most efficient way to handle the key transport, since only symmetric encryption is used and only a small amount of data has to be exchanged. However, an individual key has to be shared with every single peer, which leads to scalability problems for larger user groups.

• public-key: The initial key is exchanged with the help of public key encryption. In larger systems, this requires a PKI to handle the secure distribution of public keys.
• Diffie-Hellman: A Diffie-Hellman key exchange is used to set up the initial key. This method has a higher resaource consumption (both computation time and bandwidth) than the previous ones, and needs a PKI like in the public-key case. However, it has the advantage of providing perfect forward secrecy.

[edit] See also

• SDES Session Description Protocol Security Descriptions for Media Streams
• Key-agreement protocol
• Internet Key Exchange (IKE): Another key management protocol
• Mike or Michael for meanings of the nickname.

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