A secure authentication and key agreement scheme for iot-based cloud computing environment

Abstract

The integration of Internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing technology has made our life more convenient in recent years. Cooperating with cloud computing, Internet of things can provide more efficient and practical services. People can accept IoT services via cloud servers anytime and anywhere in the IoT-based cloud computing environment. However, plenty of possible network attacks threaten the security of users and cloud servers. To implement effective access control and secure communication in the IoT-based cloud computing environment, identity authentication is essential. In 2016, He et al. put forward an anonymous authentication scheme, which is based on asymmetric cryptography. It is claimed that their scheme is capable of withstanding all kinds of known attacks and has good performance. However, their scheme has serious security weaknesses according to our cryptanalysis. The scheme is vulnerable to insider attack and DoS attack. For overcoming these weaknesses, we present an improved authentication and key agreement scheme for IoT-based cloud computing environment. The automated security verification (ProVerif), BAN-logic verification, and informal security analysis were performed. The results show that our proposed scheme is secure and can effectively resist all kinds of known attacks. Furthermore, compared with the original scheme in terms of security features and performance, our proposed scheme is feasible.