LEES: a Hybrid Lightweight Elliptic ElGamal-Schnorr-Based Cryptography for Secure D2D Communications

Abstract

Device-to-device (D2D) communications in 5G networks will provide greater coverage, as devices will be acting as users or relays without any intermediate nodes. However, this arrangement poses specific security issues, such as rogue relays, and is susceptible to various types of attacks (impersonation, eavesdropping, denial-of-service), due to the fact that communication occurs directly. It is also recommended to send fewer control messages, due to authenticity- and secrecyrelated prevailing requirements in such scenarios. Issues related to IoT applications need to be taken into consideration as well, as IoT networks are inherently resource-constrained and susceptible to various attacks. Therefore, novel signcryption algorithms which combine encryption with digital signatures are required to provide secure 5G IoT D2D communication scenarios in order to protect user information and their data against attacks, without simultaneously increasing communication costs. In this paper, we propose LEES, a secure authentication scheme using public key encryption for secure D2D communications in 5G IoT networks. This lightweight solution is a hybrid of elliptic curve ElGamal-Schnorr algorithms. The proposed scheme is characterized by low requirements concerning computation cost, storage and network bandwidth, and is immune to security threats, thus meeting confidentiality, authenticity, integrity and non-repudiation-related criteria that are so critical for digital signature schemes. It may be used in any 5G IoT architectures requiring enhanced D2D security and performance