GRAAD: Group Anonymous and Accountable D2D Communication in Mobile Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is mainly launched by the transmission requirements between devices for specific applications such as proximity services in long-term evolution advanced networks, and each application will form a group of registered devices for the network-covered and network-absent D2D communications. During the applications of D2D communication, each device needs to identify the other devices of the same group in proximity by their group identity. This leads to the exposure of group information, by which the usage of applications can be analyzed by eavesdroppers. Hence, this paper introduces network-covered and network-absent authenticated key exchange protocols for D2D communications to guarantee accountable group anonymity, end-to-end security to network operators, as well as traceability and revocability for accounting and management requirements. We formally prove the security of those protocols, and also develop an analytic model to evaluate the quality of authentication protocols by authentication success rate in D2D communications. Besides, we implement the proposed protocols on android mobile devices to evaluate the computation costs of the protocols. We also evaluate the authentication success rate by the proposed analytic model and prove the correctness of the analytic model via simulation. Those evaluations show that the proposed protocols are feasible to the performance requirements of D2D communications.