Overview

A keychain, a sequence of keys, provides dynamic authentication to ensure secure communication by periodically changing the key and authentication algorithm without service interruption.

Each key in a keychain has a key string, authentication algorithm, sending lifetime, and receiving lifetime. When the system time is within the lifetime of a key in a keychain, an application uses the key to authenticate incoming and outgoing packets. The keys in the keychain take effect one by one according to the sequence of the configured lifetimes. In this way, the authentication algorithms and keys are dynamically changed to implement dynamic authentication.

A keychain operates in absolute time mode. In this mode, each time point during a key's lifetime is the UTC time and is not affected by the system's time zone or daylight saving time.