Secure Delivery of Equipment Identity from Vendor to Operator

The paper presents a practical and cost-efficient solution for distribution of authentication credentials of the mobile network elements from the equipment vendor to the network operator. For secure operation, configuration of initial trust in the operator´s network elements is necessary upon installation of the equipment. In certain cases, such as for radio access base stations, doing it manually can be prohibitively expensive for fast and flexible network roll-outs. A method for fully automatic identity delivery is described. Solution is especially well suited for LTE radio access network, where the base stations are already required to possess cryptographic identity by 3GPP standards, but no way of the initial trust distribution is defined.