A Secure Scalable Authentication Protocol for Access Network Communications using ECC

The secure message exchange is instrumental in the success of device-to-device communication. Any malicious activity has the potential to compromise the confidentiality or integrity of the messages exchanged between different user equipment. To address the aforementioned issue, this study proposes a novel elliptic curve cryptography based key-exchange protocol for authentication of two user equipment in network-assisted D2D communication. The proposed protocol is based on standard elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange and hash-based message authentication code. Subsequently, elaborate threat analysis of the proposed protocol against several adversarial attacks is presented to prove its resilience. The observed low computational time and communication overhead associated with this protocol and its resilience against known attacks advance its strong candidature for implementation of D2D communication in 5G cellular networks.