multimedia Internet keying (MIKEY)

MultimediaInternet Keying (MIKEY) is a security protocol for real-time communication. It supports key management, key exchange and security parameters.

MIKEY is described in RFC 3830 from 2004 and is used in particular for secure communication via the Secure Realtime Transport Protocol( SRTP). As a security protocol, the MIKEY protocol has key management with key exchange and the exchange of security-relevant parameters and thus supports multimedia applications in streaming or real-time in unicast and multicast. MIKEY is used to secure multimedia sessions in heterogeneous networks. MIKEY is independent of the signaling protocol and is added to SDP(Session Description Protocol) messages when a connection is established.

Typical application scenarios for MIKEY are Internet telephony under VoIP, video conferencing and web conferencing.