Integrated Information Life-Cycle, Data Management and Secret Key Lifecycle Management for Military Applications

One of the major problems that security aware organizations, such as the military, are concerned with when introducing innovative computational systems inside their operations is the fact that such systems will be allowing the sharing of critical information between multiple users that are connected on different terminals and are possibly located in different sites. All these features represent possible compromises in information security and hence demand the use of advanced encryption algorithms. In the case of such large scale systems, the concept of information lifecycle management has been proposed to help rationalise disk usage for distributed data storage and backup. In this paper the need for a standard to offer services for information security by encryption in such systems is explained. Such schemes exist for the case of asymmetric encryption but not for the case of symmetric key encryption. The requirements from a key management scheme are outlined. An extension of the concept of lifecycle management is proposed for this purpose. The secret key management scheme is shown to be suitable for providing an integrated information protection solution for military and critical civil systems.