Social-Aware Secret Key Generation for Secure Device-to-Device Communication via Trusted and Non-Trusted Relays

Abstract

Physical layer security (PLS) is a promising technology in device-to-device (D2D) communications by exploiting reciprocity and randomness of wireless channels, which attracts considerable research attention in the D2D communications community. In this paper, we investigated PLS for secure key generation rate (SKGR) in D2D communications based on cooperative trusted and non-trusted relays. By leveraging social ties, we exploit three social phenomena for secure communications, i.e., trusted scenario (social trust), non-trusted scenario (social reciprocity), and partially trusted scenario (mixed social trust and social reciprocity). The coalition game theory is further utilized to select the optimal relay pairs for improving SKGR. On the basis of social ties, we develop an algorithm for SKGR that protects the keys secret from both eavesdropper and non-trusted selected relays. We incorporate secure relays selection and system wide security for D2D communications. The stability and convergence of the proposed algorithm are also proved in this paper. Both numerical and analytical results verify effectiveness and consistency of our proposed scheme, which ensures better SKGR performance in D2D communications.