EAP-DDBA: Efficient Anonymity Proximity Device Discovery and Batch Authentication Mechanism for Massive D2D Communication Devices in 3GPP 5G HetNet

Device-to-device (D2D) communication as direct communication technology has many application scenarios and plays a very important role in the fifth-generation (5G) era. Using D2D communication in third generation partnership project (3GPP) 5G Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) can effectively relieve the network traffic pressure and reduce the energy consumption of the base station. However, there are numerous security threats in D2D applications since the D2D communication remains in the early stage. The existing standards and solutions rarely consider device discovery, efficient authentication, mutual authentication, and key negotiation with privacy protection for D2D user equipment (UE) in heterogeneous access scenarios. In this article, we present a unified efficient anonymity proximity device discovery and batch authentication mechanism for heterogeneous D2D UEs based on a new proposed efficient pairing-free certificateless batch signature (CLBS), the identity-based prefix encryption and Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). Our proposed scheme can be applied to all the 5G heterogeneous access scenarios of D2D communication. The security analysis and performance results show that our scheme can achieve mutual authentication, key agreement, identity privacy protection, batch verification, and resist several protocol attacks with ideal efficiency.