Privacy-Preserving Device Discovery and Authentication Scheme for D2D Communication in 3GPP 5G HetNet

Device-to-device (D2D) communication as a direct communication technology has many application scenarios and plays a very important role in the 5G era. Using D2D communication in 3GPP 5G Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) can effectively relieve the network traffic pressure and reduce the energy consumption of the base station. However, there are numerous security threats in D2D application since the introduction of D2D communication into the 3GPP 5G HetNet still remains in the early stage. It is urgent to design a mutual authentication and key agreement protocol between two heterogeneous User Equipments (UEs) with privacy preserving and device discovery. The existing standards and solutions rarely take the heterogeneous access scenarios, privacy protection, and device discovery into consideration. In this paper, we propose a unified privacy protection device discovery and authentication mechanism for heterogeneous D2D UEs using the identity-based prefix encryption and ECDH techniques. Our proposed scheme can be applied to all of the 5G heterogeneous access scenarios of D2D communication. The security analysis and performance results show that our scheme can achieve the mutual authentication, key agreement, identity privacy protection and resist several protocols attacks with ideal efficiency.