ABSTRACT
Internet Protocol (IP) multimedia services have, as the name indicates, the IP suite as a common communication platform. This chapter describes a general framework for how to secure multimedia services and examines the key management protocol Multimedia Internet KEYing (MIKEY). It focuses on IP multimedia applications based on Internet Engineering Task Force-based protocols, such as Session Initiation Protocol for signaling and the Real-Time Transport Protocol, together with the Real-Time Transport Control Protocol for the media transport. The design of protocols suitable for heterogeneous environments forces the designers to consider worst-case scenarios, in terms of bandwidth limitation, bit errors, round-trip delays, and so forth. The main target of MIKEY is to establish an Security Association and a corresponding set of traffic encryption keys (TEKs) for each crypto session. The public-key-based method includes both an asymmetric key encryption and a signing, in addition to the symmetric key operations required to encrypt the TEK generation keys.
