Services and Applications Security in IoT Enabled Networks

5G wireless together with optical backbone networks are expected to be the main pillars of the envisaged next /future generation networking (N/FGN) infrastructures. This is an impetus to practical realization of an IoT network that will support and ensure relatively higher bandwidth as well as enhanced quality of service (QoS) in both access and core network sections. The high-speed wireless links at the network peripherals will serve as a conducive platform for device-to-device (D2D) communication. D2D driven applications and services can only be effective as well as secure assuming the associated machine type communication devices (MTCDs) have been successfully verified and authenticated. Typically, D2D type services and applications involve the interaction of several MTCDs in a group. As such, secure and effective D2D group-based authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols are necessary. They need to inherently achieve efficacy in maintaining the group key unlink-ability as well as generate minimal signalling overheads that otherwise may lead to network congestion. In this paper we detail a secure and efficient Group AKA (Gr-AKA) protocol for D2D communication. Its performance is compared to that of existing similar protocols and is found to comparably lower both computational as well as signalling overhead requirements. Overall the analysis shows that the Gr-AKA protocol improves performance in terms of fulfilling D2D communication’s security requirements.