Key

The Key holds the information about the cryptographic key and its lifecycle. It represents the cryptographic key in a human-readable format. Key holds the following information:

• Key management details
• Attributes of the Key
• Association with other related objects like Certificate
• History of events associated with the Key
• Wrapped content of other related parts of the Key, for example public/private key, or split/component parts

In addition to the above details, the following are mapped to the Key for the ease of management:

• Token Profile it belongs to and managed by
• Owner of the Key
• Group it belongs to
• Optionally description of the Key

Attributes

Key attributes hold information related to the platform. It can contain Custom Attributes as well as Metadata Attributes.

Metadata Attributes provides any additional information about the Key that can be technology specific. They can be used for further processing of the Key by different components and modules of the platform.

Key state

Every key has defined its state during its lifecycle. The state of the Key defines its lifecycle phase and operations that can be performed. Once the Key is created, it is in the Pre-active state and must be activated before it can be used for any cryptographic operation.

The following states are supported:

State	Description
Pre-active	The Key is created and ready to be used once activated, or activate date is reached
Active	The Key is ready to be used
Deactivated	The Key is not ready to be used
Compromised	The Key is compromised and cannot be used, however it still exists
Destroyed	The Key is destroyed and mark for removal, however it is still in the inventory for the auditing purposes

The transition Key state diagram is as follows:

Key usage

Every key has defined its key usages. The key usage can restrict the type of cryptographic operation that can be performed using the Key.

The following key usages are supported:

Key Usage	Description
Encrypt	Allows to request encryption operation using the Key
Decrypt	Allows to request decryption operation using the Key
Sign	Allows to request signing operation using the Key
Verify	Allows to request verification operation using the Key
Wrap	Allows to request wrapping operation using the Key
Unwrap	Allows to request unwrapping operation using the Key

The supported key usages and key types combinations are:

Key Type	Key Usage
Public Key	Encrypt, Verify, Wrap
Private Key	Decrypt, Sign, Unwrap
Secret Key	Encrypt, Decrypt, Sign, Verify, Wrap, Unwrap