A media-independent handover key management architecture is disclosed that uses Kerberos for secure key distribution among a server, an authenticator, and a mobile node. In the preferred embodiments, signaling for key distribution is based on re-keying and is decoupled from re-authentication that requires EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) and AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting) signaling similar to initial network access authentication. In this framework, the mobile node is able to obtain master session keys required for dynamically establishing the security associations with a set of authenticators without communicating with them before handover. By separating re-key operation from re-authentication, the proposed architecture is more optimized for a proactive mode of operation. It can also be optimized for reactive mode of operation by reversing the key distribution roles between the mobile node and the target access node.