Secure Keying Scheme for Network Slicing in 5G Architecture

Abstract

Network slicing is one of the key enabling technologies of evolving fifth generation (5G) mobile communication that fulfills multitudes of service demands of 5G networks. Although the concept of network slicing, its deployment scenarios and some security aspects like slice isolation are discussed in detail, key management for network slicing based applications is still not a well-investigated research area. In this paper, we propose a secure keying scheme that is suitable for network slicing architecture when the slices are accessed by the third party applications. Since the secure keying scheme is designed using a multi-party computation mechanism, it ensures the consent of monitored use cases or devices which the data is acquired. We discuss the performance, scalability and security properties of the keying scheme to demonstrate its appropriateness under evolving 5G paradigm.