IT Baseline Protection Manual - The Information Warfare Site

Safeguard Catalogue - Personnel Remarks
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requirements have to be satisfied by the technical components that are used for
digital signatures, and what tasks are to be performed by certification
authorities which issue verification key certificates. In addition it governs how
the required security of the components and certification authorities is to be
checked. As a result, digital signatures conforming to the Signature law are
accorded a high level of security, also in court.
Key management
Whenever encryption is used, the problem arises of ensuring appropriate
management of the keys. The question is raised as to how the following tasks
are performed throughout the lifecycle of the keys:
- Generation/initialisation
- Agreement/establishment
- Distribution/transport
- Changing/updating
- Storage
- Authentication/certification
- Recall
- Recovery in the event of destruction or loss
- Destruction/deletion
- Archiving
- Escrow (storage in trust)
Key management can, and usually does, also make use of cryptographic
techniques. It must be performed for all of the crypto modules of a
cryptographically based protection system. Secret keys must be protected
against unauthorised disclosure, modification and replacement. Public keys
must be protected against unauthorised modification and replacement.
Appropriate key management is a necessary precondition if it is to be at all
possible to protect information by cryptographic methods. Key management
requires its own resources, dedicated specifically to this task.
Certification bodies
Trust centres or certification bodies are required whenever it is considered
necessary to use asymmetric crypto algorithms for digital signatures or for
encryption and the number of users has risen so much as to be difficult to
manage. These procedures require a different key for signature generation or
encryption than they do for signature checking or decryption. A pair of
corresponding keys is generated for this purpose on a user-related basis. One
key, known as the public key, is made known publicly. The other key, known
as the private key, must be kept absolutely secret. A digital signature can be
generated or a text encrypted with the private key – and only with that key –
and the signature can be verified or the text decrypted with the associated
public key – again, only with that key. In order to ascertain whether the public
keys are genuine and to check that keys are reliably allotted to individuals, it
is necessary to use the trust centres or certification bodies mentioned above,
which confirm the attribution of a person to a public key by issuing a
certificate.
Typically, the following tasks are undertaken at certification bodies such as
these:
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IT-Baseline Protection Manual: Oktober 2000