Distributed Trusted Authority-based Key Management for Beyond 5G Network Coding-enabled Mobile Small Cells

The 5G cellular network is projected to be introduced in 2020 and takes advantage of the small cell technology to deliver ubiquitous 5G services in an energy efficient manner. The next logical step is the introduction of network coding-enabled mobile small cells (NC-MSCs). These are networks of mobile devices which can be set up on-the-fly, based on demand, and cover the urban landscape. Furthermore, they allow network offloading through multi-hop device-to-device (D2D) communication to provide high data rate services. In this paper we introduce DISTANT, a decentralized key management scheme specifically designed to provide security in a network which takes advantage of the benefits of NC-MSCs. In our key management scheme, we distribute the certification authority (CA) functions using threshold secret sharing. Each network node is provided with a share of the master private key such that key management services are available “anywhere, anytime”. Finally, our distributed CA takes advantage of the self-generated certificate paradigm. Certificates can therefore be issued and renewed without the interaction of the distributed CA which minimizes the communication overhead.