Patent ID: 7929703

Claim:
A system for managing security keys in a wireless network, comprising: a service provider certification authority (SPCA) configured to receive a root public key of a manufacturer certification authority(MCA) and configured to manage digital SPCA certificates and files used by a new network element (NE) and legacy NEs to communicate securely within the network, a signing server (SS) configured to provide signing services to the new NEs and legacy NEs and configured to authenticate the new and legacy NEs to the network, and an element manager (EM) configured to provide security key and digital certificate management, provisioning and initialization of any new NEs or legacy NEs that are directly or indirectly managed by the element manager, wherein to authenticate a legacy NE which is not installed with a digital MCA certificate, the signed digital MCA certificate being used for authentication of the new NE's security key pair to enable secure communications with other NEs in the network: the EM is configured to receive the legacy NE's public key and request at least one signed digital certificate from the SS, the SS is configured to send the EM a digital certificate for its public key indicating that it is a trusted SS, signed by the SPCA, and a digital certificate of the SPCA's root public key, self-signed by the SPCA, and the EM is configured to generate a digital certificate for the legacy NE's public key, signed by the EM, and bundle the SS certificate, SPCA certificate, certificate of the legacy NE's public key signed by the EM and its own digital certificate of its public key signed by the SS, each of the certificates for sending as a bundle of certificates with the legacy NE's public key to the legacy NE, the bundle of certificates representing a chain delegation of certificates of trusted sources which points to the root public key of the SPCA for authenticating the legacy NE for commencing peer-to-peer communications in the network.