Anonymous remote user authentication and key agreement for cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is a remote provision computing technology, which enables user for convenient on-demand access to networks, servers, storage, applications, and services with minimal management effort. Some of the popular cloud services are data storage as services (DSAS) and software as a service (SAAS). In these services, cloud provides the infrastructure for the remote user to store its data or to access software anytime and anywhere without the knowledge or expertise or control over the cloud. Since, a user accesses the remote server through a public channel where an attacker may have full control over the public network. If user and server do not establish a secure session, an attacker gets an opportunity to perform various attacks. Moreover, an attacker can acquire user’s sensitive personal information if massage includes user’s original identity. Therefore, an anonymous mutual authentication mechanism is the paramount requirement to restrict illegal access of cloud server and to ensure user’s privacy. In this article, we present a cloud user-server anonymous mutual authentication framework in which user and server authenticate each other and establish a session key without disclosing users’ original identity over the public channels. Moreover, user can change its private key periodically to avoid key compromise impersonation attack, which also enhances anonymity during communication. Further, we analyze our scheme to illustrate that the proposed scheme is efficient to establish a secure session between the user and server without losing user anonymity.