A Lightweight Certificateless User Authentication Scheme for Mobile Environment

Abstract

Nowadays, smartphone applications are the most widespread in our daily lives. These applications raised several security concerns such as authentication, key agreement, and mutual authentication. Accordingly, the researchers have been presented several user authentication schemes based on the identity-based cryptography (IBC) and certificateless cryptography (CLC). Smartphones considered as limited resources devices, thus, it needs lightweight protocols. However, the existing schemes are suffering from high computational costs especially the one that depends on CLC. In this paper, a lightweight certificateless user authentication scheme based on the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is introduced. The proposed scheme has the lowest computation costs comparing with the existing certificateless user’s authentication protocols. Furthermore, The proposed scheme is secure under the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) Problem and the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). Indeed, the proposed scheme is suitable to use in the mobile client-server environment and the Internet of things (IoT) applications.