A Certificateless Authentication Protocol for D2D Group Communications in 5G Cellular Networks

With the rising demand for digital world and the emergence of new application scenarios, 5G wireless networks have become the key enabler of a new era. As one of the promising technologies, device-to-device (D2D) group communications are expected to improve spectral efficiency and reduce latency. However, to negotiate a group session key securely and effectively has become an urgent problem. In this paper, we propose a certificateless authentication and key agreement protocol using elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) and digital signature to guarantee secure and anonymous D2D group communications in 5G cellular networks. The security analysis based on the formal verification by using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) shows that the security goal can be achieved. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of the proposed solution in terms of computation and communication costs based on extensive simulation experiments. The results demonstrate that our proposal is lightweight and efficient.