Traditional Centralized Key Management Systems (KMS) fundamentally conflict with the core philosophies advocated by decentralized storage systems, such as decentralization, censorship resistance, and user autonomy. Their inherent single points of failure and trust bottlenecks severely constrain overall system security. To systematically explore secure key management pathways without trusted third parties, this paper conducts a systematic review of research progress in the field of Decentralized Key Management (DKM). We propose an analytical framework covering four key stages: key generation, distributed distribution, dynamic rotation, and revocation verification. Furthermore, we distill four core evaluation dimensions supporting this framework: security, efficiency, dynamic adaptability, and hierarchical access control. Through the classification, comparison, and in-depth analysis of representative technical schemes, this paper aims to provide clear theoretical references and design guidelines for key security management in decentralized storage systems. Finally, this paper summarizes the major technical challenges currently facing the field and provides an outlook on future research directions.
An et al. (Wed,) studied this question.