Group anonymous D2D communication with end-to-end security in LTE-A

Device-to-device (D2D) communication in LTE-A standardized as proximity services (ProSe) has satisfied only basic security requirements, such as mutual authentication and key exchange by the security architecture. However, the applications of ProSe and Public Safety additionally require end-to-end security and anonymous protection (i.e., group anonymity). Therefore, this work presents two authenticated key exchange protocols for end-to-end security and group anonymous protection in network-covered and network-absent D2D communications, respectively. With group anonymous protection, users of ProSe-enabled mobile devices can conceal their identity and group information during D2D communications. The anonymous protection also supports revocability and traceability to revoke mobile users and disclose the identity and group information of suspicious D2D communications in ProSe. In terms of security, two proposed schemes are proven by formal analyses. In terms of performance, we implement the group anonymous authentication protocol on android devices to evaluate the feasibility. In addition, we simulate the proposed protocols for network-covered and network-absent D2D communication to estimate authentication success rate.