Security association

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A Security Association (SA) is the set of security information that two entities share in order to support secure communication. SA includes Data Encryption Standard key, initialization vector digital certificates etc.

The fundamental requirement of SA arrives when two entities communicate over more than one channel. Take an example of mobile subscriber and a base station. Subscriber may subscribe itself for more than one service. So for every service there may be different service primitives like data encryption algorithm, public key, initialization vector. Now to make things easier, all this security information is grouped logically. This logical group itself is Security Association. Each SA has its own ID called SAID. So now base station and mobile subscriber will share SAID and they will derieve all the security parameter, making things a lot easier.

In nutshell, Security Association (SA) is a logical group of some security parameters, that ease sharing the info to other entity.

Naresh Prajapati (naresh.prajapati@hsc.com)

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