Secure device to device communications over WiFi direct
D2D communications facilitate proximal devices to directly communicate with each other, bypassing cellular base stations or access points, and bring many benefits such as improvement in both spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. Among existing D2D enabling techniques, the recently released WiFi Direct is one promising protocol that offers high data rate D2D communications in local areas. However, WiFi Direct is susceptible to security threats due to the open access of wireless channels and lack of security infrastructures. In this article, we identify several attacks that challenge WiFi Direct based D2D communications. Since pairwise key establishment lies in the area of securing D2D communications, we introduce a short authentication string based key agreement protocol and analyze its security performance. We also integrate the SAS based key agreement protocol into the existing WiFi Direct protocol, and implement it using Android smartphones.
IEEE Network