A mutual and pseudo inverse matrix-based authentication mechanism for outsourcing service

Abstract

Database outsourcing is becoming popular in which the data owners ship their data to external service provider. Such a model provides organizations advantages such as cost savings and service benefits. However, the delegation of database management to service provider, which is not fully trusted, introduces many significant security and privacy issues. They can be referred to as authentication, data confidentiality and integrity, data privacy, secure auditing. Among them, authentication takes an important role and is the first defence to prevent an unauthorized user from accessing to the outsourced data. In this paper, we first propose a novel public key encryption scheme with keyword search based on pseudo inverse matrix, named PEKS-PM. We prove that PEKS-PM is secure and more efficient than the public key encryption scheme with keyword search based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) which is the best searchable encryption scheme known to date. Based on PEKS-PM, we propose a mutual authentication mechanism which can be used to authenticate the user and the server mutually to establish an intended connection but the server learns nothing about the user's login information. Our proposed authentication mechanism can prevent man-in-the-middle, session high-jacking and replay attacks. © 2011 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.