The software processing for the QKD stack runs on
the integrated processor and it can generate up to 3
kbps final key material.
QKD introduces a new quality for symmetric key
exchange primitives. It enables provable security and
high key-update rates. But it also has some drawback.
Due to the non-cloning theorem and the attenuation
QKD is limited in distance. The optical signal can-
not be repeated and the damped signals lead to lower
rates over distance. Current QKD links provide key
rates in the kilobit range over distances up to 100 km.
Moreover, some new protocols and advances in sin-
gle photon detection will allow for rates in the Mbps
region.
2.2 IPsec
The Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) suite of pro-
tocols defines a collection of standards to secure IP
traffic. It provides a framework to secure commu-
nication at the network layer by adding authentica-
tion data and/or encryption to IP packets. Our im-
plementation supports only the Encapsulating Secu-
rity Payload (ESP) protocol in tunnel mode. ESP in
tunnel mode is the most useful setting for gateway-
to-gateway VPNs. It provides data authentication,
integrity and confidentiality to IP packets. ESP en-
crypts the whole original packet and adds authentica-
tion data and an ESP header. Encrypted ESP packets
guarantee even the anonymity of sender and receiver
because this information is encrypted too. The final
ESP packet contains the IP addresses of the two gate-
ways as source and destination address.
IPsec defines a bunch of symmetric ciphers. Our
implementation makes uses of the Advanced En-
cryption Standard (AES) (National Institute of Stan-
dards and Technology (NIST), 2001). In accor-
dance to the recommendations of VPN-B in (Hoff-
man, 2005) our implementation uses AES-128 in
CBC mode for data confidentiality and AES-XCBC-
MAC-96 (Frankel and Herbert, 2003) for data authen-
tication. AES is processed by hardware modules.
The whole IPsec handling of the prototype is per-
formed by an IPsec offload engine, as the power of
the embedded PowerPC CPU on the system-on-chip
is very limited. To support throughput rates in the
gigabit region, most components of the IPsec func-
tionality are implemented in hardware. The software
subsystem is only used to configure and monitor these
hardware modules.
The IPsec engine is composed of three main com-
ponents: A filter module, an encryption unit and a
routing module. The filter module holds a copy of the
security policy database (SPD) and decides if an ar-
riving IP packet should bypass the system, or if it has
to be encrypted/decrypted, or if needs to be discarded.
The encryption unit consist of a key store, which re-
sembles the SADB, and AES encryption and decryp-
tion modules. The key store can hold up to 32 SAs
per direction and manages their lifetime without soft-
ware interaction. After leaving the encryption unit,
the packets are forwarded to their destination gateway
by the routing module. Routing is necessary because
the destination IP address is known just after decrypt-
ing the ESP packet. The according Ethernet MAC
address of the destination has to be obtained for each
packet.
The software part of the IPsec engine runs on a
Linux 2.6 kernel. It is responsible for the configura-
tion of the hardware modules. The software receives
the configuration and key material via the PF_KEY
interface. Hence it is compatible with all standard
IPsec key management implementations.
2.3 WBEM
VPN gateways offer complex functionality. Config-
uration of its services usually involves setting many
parameters on at least two endpoints. A secure man-
agement interface has to assure that the configurations
on all devices are synchronized. To prevent temporary
security holes a strict sequence of commands needs to
be executed. This is error-prone and leads to security
risks, especially when traditional configuration tools
like secure shell (SSH) are used.
For this reasons, we decided to use Web-Based
Enterprise Management (WBEM) (DMTF, ) as man-
agement technology. It is one approach of solving
the management problem in heterogeneous networks.
WBEM is a set of standards that has been developed
by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
WBEM-based solutions provide out-of-the-box capa-
bilities to make policy deployment on different ma-
chines transparent to the user.
Our implementation uses the Small Footprint CIM
Broker (SFCB) from IBM (Standards Based Linux In-
strumentation, ) as WBEM server running on each
gateway. In addition we developed a graphical tool
that allows to easily configure and monitor VPN gate-
ways.
3 KEY MANAGEMENT
The presented key management approach focuses pri-
marily on high key update rates for IPsec. Addition-
ally, the management of the generated QKD keys is of
interest. Figure 3 shows the key related operations of
KEY MANAGEMENT OF QUANTUM GENERATED KEYS IN IPSEC
179