Secure Key Establishment for Device-to-Device Communications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a secure, efficient key agreement protocol for device-to-device communications that reduces overhead and is integrated into Wi-Fi Direct, enhancing security without prior shared secrets.

Contribution

It introduces a novel D2D key agreement protocol based on Diffie-Hellman and commitment schemes, optimized for minimal communication and computation overhead.

Findings

Protocol reduces communication overhead

Implementation on Android smartphones demonstrates practicality

Security analysis confirms robustness against attacks

Abstract

With the rapid growth of smartphone and tablet users, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications have become an attractive solution for enhancing the performance of traditional cellular networks. However, relevant security issues involved in D2D communications have not been addressed yet. In this paper, we investigate the security requirements and challenges for D2D communications, and present a secure and efficient key agreement protocol, which enables two mobile devices to establish a shared secret key for D2D communications without prior knowledge. Our approach is based on the Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol and commitment schemes. Compared to previous work, our proposed protocol introduces less communication and computation overhead. We present the design details and security analysis of the proposed protocol. We also integrate our proposed protocol into the existing Wi-Fi Direct protocol, and implement it using Android smartphones.