In 2012, the UK government’s National Technical Authority for Information and Assurance (CESG) – now the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – defined MIKEY-SAKKE as a standard to answer the security requirements from the UK government to specify secure, open and patent free cryptographic methods in order to empower private industry to provide UK government interoperable secure communication solutions.
The MIKEY-SAKKE standard is based upon an existing standard for elliptic curve signatures, the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and an identity-based cryptographic protocol developed by two Japanese researchers, SAKAI and KASAHARA. Using these protocols for secure communications gave rise to MIKEY-SAKKE, defined by the IETF as RFC6507, RFC6508 and RFC6509.
MIKEY-SAKKE has been approved by 3GPP for use in Mission-Critical applications, such as emergency services communications. 3GPP is the collaboration project which provides system specifications for cellular telecommunications network technologies.