A Secure Mutual Authentication Protocol Based on Visual Cryptography Technique for IoT-Cloud

Because of the increasing number of threats in the IoT cloud, an advanced security mechanism is needed to guard data against hacking or attacks. A user authentication mechanism is also required to authenticate the user accessing the cloud services. The conventional cryptographic algorithms used to provide security mechanisms in cloud networks are often vulnerable to various cyber-attacks and inefficient against new attacks. Therefore, developing new solutions based on different mechanisms from traditional cryptography methods is required to protect data and users' privacy from attacks. Different from the conventional cryptography method, we suggest a secure mutual authentication protocol based on the visual cryptography technique in this paper. We use visual cryptography to encrypt and decrypt the secret images. The mutual authentication is based on two secret images and tickets. The user requests the ticket from the authentication server (AS) to obtain the permission for accessing the cloud services. Three shared secret keys are used for encrypting and decrypting the authentication process. We analyze the protocol using the Barrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN)-logic method and the results show that the protocol is robust and can protect the user against various attacks. Also, it can provide a secure mutual authentication mechanism.