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What is Cryptographic Key Management?

The practices and procedures for generating, storing, distributing, rotating, and revoking encryption keys securely.

Key management is often the weakest link in cryptographic systems — strong encryption is useless if keys are poorly managed. Best practices include generating keys with cryptographically secure random generators, storing keys in Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) or managed services (AWS KMS, HashiCorp Vault, Azure Key Vault), separating key encryption keys from data encryption keys, implementing key rotation schedules, maintaining key access logs, and having key revocation procedures. Never hardcode keys in source code or store them alongside encrypted data. The key lifecycle spans generation, distribution, storage, usage, rotation, archival, and destruction.

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