Secure time information in the internet key exchange protocol

Many network services and protocols can work correctly only when freshness of messages sent between participants is assured and when the protocol parties’ internal clocks are adjusted. In this paper we present a novel, secure and fast procedure which can be used to ensure data freshness and clock synchronization between two communicating parties. Next, we show how this solution can be used in other cryptographic protocols. As an example of application we apply our approach to the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol family.