The invention relates to a method for establishing a secure communication between a first network device (initiator) and a second network device (responder) in a communication network and to an arrangement of network device suitable for this purpose, which are distinguished by using a symmetric cryptosystem in which both network devices each use the same secrets as keys for encrypting and decrypting data sets for performing a respective separate authentication with respect to the first and second network devices before generating a secret to be used as a shared key for the secure communication.