Centralised Key Management System Architecture for Topology-Aware and Quantum-Resilient Security in QKD-Integrated SDN Control Planes

Abstract

Design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a key management system acting as the central trust anchor of a fully QKD-integrated software-defined networking architecture. The KMS mediates BB84-derived key material to every OpenFlow switch under hierarchical role-based access control across three key-type domains, and runs a four-state key lifecycle with pre-emptive refresh, AES-256-GCM storage and a tamper-protected audit subsystem. Evaluated on Ryu 4.34 and Open vSwitch 2.17 in a twelve-switch Mininet testbed at 19 to 33 percent overhead against classical RSA plus TLS. Its background section characterises the SDN control plane as a system-wide trust anchor and reports the five-attack-surface decomposition of that plane due to Scott-Hayward et al.