A Lightweight D2D Authentication Scheme against Free-riding Attacks in 5G Cellular Network

Abstract

As a promising feature in 5G, device-to-device (D2D) communication is the technology allowing adjacent mobile devices to communicate directly without relaying the data over base stations. D2D technology can potentially increase the network capacity by offloading network traffic in a distributed manner. However, there are also new security challenges such as free-riding attack prevention, device anonymity protection and end-to-end data secrecy. Also, since there are many mobile devices which have limited computational resources in 5G cellular network, there is a need to develop a lightweight authentication protocol which addresses all these security requirements with low computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight D2D authentication and key agreement protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Specifically, our proposed scheme makes use of the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA), elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) and authenticated encryption with associate data (AEAD) to provide secure device discovery, mutual authentication, key agreement and data transmission for all 5G D2D devices. Our scheme is computationally lightweight to be supported in any resource-constrained 5G devices, and it can resist several active and passive protocol attacks including eavesdropping, replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack and free-riding attack. We analyze the security of our protocol with Scyther to show our scheme is resistant to these attacks. Finally, performance evaluation shows our scheme is efficient for both UEs and CN with rationally low computational costs.