End-to-end protection of media stream encryption keys for voice-over-ip systems

The present invention reduces the exposure of keying material to intermediary devices in a communication channel between first and second servers. In one embodiment, a second server receives a first half of media stream keys from a first server. The second server uses a Kerberos-based Application Request and tickets to communicate the second half of the media stream keys to the first server. Using this approach, the exposure of the media stream keys is reduced to only the servers.