A Novel Method for Secure Key-Sharing in 5G and Beyond

In today’s world, online communication is essential, and infrastructure for cutting-edge mobile technologies like 5G, is growing daily to meet the demand. So, information sharing security needs to be safeguarded as electronic communications spread. To implement this, cryptography is typically used, and most commonly symmetric key cryptography, due to its many advantages over other crypto-systems. However, one significant disadvantage of symmetric key system is that the single-key-sharing is exposed to all entities in a network communication system, which makes the subsequent communications vulnerable to unauthorized access. There are many approaches for securing the single-key-sharing transmission, but each has its own drawbacks. In this paper, we propose and present a novel approach to secure key-sharing over a communication network in symmetric key cryptography system which makes the single-key immune to unauthorized access. A total of four messages are exchanged between two devices for our secure key-sharing method. To implement the key sharing process, our method employs a few techniques, including asymmetric key cryptography, hash functions, machine learning-based pseudo random number generators, and timers. Our analysis shows that, besides providing similar level of confidentiality as the existing approaches, it also provides other significant improvements over the current ones, such as enhanced integrity maintenance, and authenticity verification of the two devices involved in the process. The short latency of modern 5G networks helps to balance the increased network demand caused by sending four independent messages. To determine timer duration and key validity, we propose applying AI algorithms and extending the security of our method; nevertheless, these applications fall within the purview of our upcoming study.