A Lightweight and Secure Data Sharing Protocol for D2D Communications

Abstract

D2D communications empower operators to offer their services at the highest level of quality provided that issues concerning availability and security are addressed first. The explosive amount of mobile data traffic, on one hand, and the growing demand for available services on the other hand, motivate us to propose a secure, lightweight and available data sharing scheme for D2D communications. Data sharing, an increasingly popular service among mobile users, could play a noticeable role in offloading the traffic data from operators if handled by D2D communications. In this paper, we propose an efficient protocol for secure data sharing in D2D communication. In the proposed protocol, the major security challenges about data sharing like, data confidentiality, integrity, detecting message modification, and preventing the propagation of malformed data are considered. Additionally, not only unauthorized users are banned from using our service, but also by keeping records about the history of the authorized users actions, we are able to punish misbehaving users, if their malicious behavior exceeds a threshold. The evaluation of the proposed protocol proves that it is more lightweight than the previous works and supports the security requirements of data sharing scheme. © 2017 IEEE.