A Lightweight Incognito Key Exchange Mechanism for LTE-A Assisted D2D Communication

Abstract

Security, privacy, and availability are the crucial factors in Device-to-Device (D2D) communication. 5G is enabled with IPv6 to provide IP to the growing D2D communication and they are expected to operate over the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks. With the increase in the 5G devices, there is a major security threat as any high-level device like smartphones has the ability to hack the network. The higher capability device can spoof IP of lower capability devices like household equipment to gain access into a trusted environment. Henceforth, there is a need for promising security architecture to protect a wide range of 5G devices and data. With the increase in the 5G devices, the device security and mobility management task at the core network will increase tremendously and impose huge core network overhead. Meanwhile 5G, multi-tier architecture has a stringent latency requirement which brings new security challenges due to frequent handovers and a wide range of authentication mechanisms in 5G small cells. Therefore we propose a Lightweight Incognito Key Exchange (LIKE) protocol for LTE-A supported D2D authentication and secret key sharing. Our objective is to provide a secure and user privacy ensured D2D communication that can promise a secure, low-cost and highly available D2D service for the upcoming delay and energy constrained 5G devices.