Group authentication protocol based on aggregated signatures for D2D communication

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is one of the most promising technologies of new mobile communication networks (5G), and essential for the Communicating Things Networks (CTNs) paradigm. Its application scope has been widened and billions of devices are expected to be communicating in the next years. Moreover, goals, such as end-to-end security and reductions in computational costs required by resource-constrained devices, must be accomplished for its full implementation. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardized authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols are not suitable for D2D due to differences in the architecture and communication scenario. They may cause several security issues and excessive computational and transmission overhead, since they require individual executions for each pair of devices. The development of AKA protocols adapted to D2D group communication is still in its initial steps. This article introduces a new authentication and key agreement protocol for D2D groups of devices based on asymmetric cryptography and aggregated signatures. The scheme focuses on robust security and reductions in computational and communication costs. It was compared to other group AKA protocols and yielded better results regarding security and overhead reduction. A formal validation conducted by Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool (AVISPA) proved its robustness.