Multi-Channel Authentication for Secure D2D using Optical Camera Communication

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a promising solution for providing on-demand network connectivity to numerous devices. In particular, the autonomous D2D approach enables personal devices to flexibly communicate with each other with less operation. Despite all the benefits of D2D communication, security is a significant concern because of the broadcast nature of wireless communication. The biggest threats for the autonomous D2D are masquerading, impersonation, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks due to absence of a trusted third party. There have been many research efforts on this problem including physical layer based and the well-known Diffie-Hellman based approaches. However, they cannot be employed for authentication between physically distant devices. To address this problem, this paper proposes a multi-channel authentication for the autonomous D2D using optical camera communication (OCC). It executes the Diffie-Hellman key exchange in an optical link between a light source and a camera. The idea behind the proposed scheme is to leverage the limited reachability of OCC for ensuring security; a device can only communicate with a visible device. In this paper we introduce the security analysis for the proposed authentication and preliminary results using smartphones.