An efficient anonymous mutual authentication technique for providing secure communication in mobile cloud computing for smart city applications

• Published in: Sustainable cities and society 2019-08, Vol.49, p.101522, Article 101522
• Main Authors: Jegadeesan, Subramani, Azees, Maria, Kumar, Priyan Malarvizhi, Manogaran, Gunasekaran, Chilamkurti, Naveen, Varatharajan, R., Hsu, Ching-Hsien
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anonymous; Computational cost; Mutual authentication; Secret key; Security; Session key distribution
• ISSN: 2210-6707; 2210-6715
• DOI: 10.1016/j.scs.2019.101522

•The proposed scheme provides an anonymous mutual authentication to authenticate both mobile users and the service providers using some efficient cryptosystems without including use of SSL.•The proposed anonymous mutual authentication scheme greatly alleviates the computational cost.•The proposed authentication scheme can efficiently exchange the session keys for successful anonymous authentication. Nowadays, the number of mobile users has considerably increased in recent years. The users can utilize several cloud computing services through their mobile devices during their mobility. However, providing secure access to these services is difficult due to the open nature of the wireless communication medium. In this paper, we proposed an efficient anonymous mutual authentication technique for mobile cloud computing in smart city applications. In this technique, both the mobile user (Ui) and the service provider (Sj) are required to prove their legitimacy to each other, and hence the legitimate Ui can utilize all the cloud computing services in an efficient and secure way. The security analysis part shows the security strength of the proposed anonymous mutual authentication technique against various security attacks and the performance analysis part shows that the proposed method is efficient in terms of computational overhead in comparison with the existing schemes.