Abstract
The momentous development in the technology of wireless communication has escalated the wide acceptance of Device to Device (D2D) communication among mobile devices. However, enormous requests of devices may curtail the effectiveness of conventional single-server based authentication frameworks. To overcome such limitation, multi-server authentication framework is introduced. This framework facilitates the devices to use multiple services granted from several servers through single registration via the registration center. In recent ages, numerous multi-server authentication protocols have been developed to securely facilitate the huge amount of devices via variety of servers. Nonetheless, most of these protocols are susceptible to various security threats and proved to be inefficient in terms of computation and communication overheads. In this article, we have proposed an Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based multi-server authentication framework using Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) for D2D communication. We have shown that our proposed protocol is more secure and robust using Random Oracle Model (ROM). The informal security analysis reveals that proposed protocol accomplishes all security needs of multi-server infrastructure. Further, we have separately computed all cryptographic operations for client, server and Registration Center (RC) to get desired experimental results. The performance analysis illustrates that introduced protocol attains compelling security improvements with least possible computation complexity compared to related protocols. Hence, the strong security features of our proposed protocol demonstrate its strength and make it viable for practical implementation.