Injecting trust to cryptographic Key Management

Not withstanding the adoption of strong cryptographic mechanisms, the anticipated degree of security in the protection and management of privacy sensitive data can only be achieved, if secret keys can be shielded adequately. In practice, most implementations are based on software tokens that shall guard the keys against eavesdropping. This fact alleviates the hardness of circumvention of used cryptographic protocols and with this the disclosure of secret keys. In this paper we propose a key management architecture which - based on the capabilities of trusted computing technology - will provide a higher level of security.