Design of a key exchange protocol between SIM card and service provider

Abstract

Current capabilities of smart cards, Smartphones, and cellular network provoke companies to provide vast amount of services to the mobile users. Some of those services require end-to-end encryption between a Service Provider and a SIM card. Keyed SIM cards already contain the required structure for secure key generation and upload, whereas un-keyed SIM cards do not have the required capability for this. In this paper, we provide a key exchange protocol, which creates a symmetric key by the collaborative work of SIM card and the Service Provider server. After a successful protocol run, SIM card and Service Provider can perform end-to-end data encryption.