Key Management

A security association contains the following information:

• Material for keys for encryption and authentication

• The algorithms that can be used

• The identities of the endpoints

• Other parameters that are used by the system

SAs require keying material for authentication and encryption. The managing of keying material that SAs require is called key management.The Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol handles key management automatically. You can also manage keys manually with the ipseckey(1M) command. Currently, SAs on IPv4 packets can use automatic key management, while SAs on IPv6 packets require manual management.

See IKE Overview, for how IKE manages cryptographic keys automatically for IPv4 hosts. See Keying Utilities, for how the administrator can manually manage the cryptographic keys by using the ipseckey command.