This allows us to do things like concentrate the confidentiality of information in a single key, but does not eliminate the need for keeping things confidential. Moreover, it raises new problems in the area of what is called key management .
Key management involves several different things, each of which is discussed below.
One of the early security bugs discovered in Netscape concerns the manner in which they were selecting session keys for use in encryption. The problem of generating random unpredictable keys is one that people often overlook, but is serious. Computers are designed in such a way that they are predictable, and sampling predictable quantities is antithetic to producing cryptographic keys. Another approach altogether is to relieve the client machine of the need to produce cryptographic keys, and to devise a system in which the ability to produce session keys is concentrated in a trusted authority. This is the approach used by the Kerberos system, and will be discussed in some detail in a future lecture.