US Patent 8111828 Management of cryptographic keys for securing stored data

A management system generates a sequence of keys and an identifier of each key in the sequence. A current key in the sequence and the identifier of the current key are transferred from the management system to a storage system. The storage system encrypts the data into encrypted data using the current key. The storage system stores the identifier and the encrypted data. The identifier and the encrypted data are retrieved from the storage system. The key in the sequence identified by the identifier is transferred from the management system to the storage system. The storage system decrypts the encrypted data using the decryption key.