Group Anonymous D2D Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for Mobile Networks

Device to device (D2D) communication is an important facility in LTE-A Networks which enables devices to converse directly without the contribution of evolved NodeB (eNBs) or base station. This feature improves the performance of networks in terms of spectrum efficiency, cellular coverage, network delay and fairness over the LTE-A networks. Direct connections between devices are vulnerable to various security and privacy attacks due to the open nature of D2D communications. The authentication between user equipments (UEs) and eNB can provide preliminary protection for underlying cellular networks. However, D2D communications still face threats such as eavesdropping, jamming, impersonation, free-riding and so on. Hence this paper introduces network-covered authenticated key exchange protocol for D2D communication to assure group anonymity and end-to-end security. The proposed scheme is implemented to estimate the communication and computation costs of the protocol. The implementation results shows that the proposed protocol is secure and realistic to the performance requirements of D2D communications.