An Efficient and Provably Secure Anonymous User Authentication and Key Agreement for Mobile Cloud Computing

Nowadays, due to the rapid development and wide deployment of handheld mobile devices, the mobile users begin to save their resources, access services, and run applications that are stored, deployed, and implemented in cloud computing which has huge storage space and massive computing capability with their mobile devices. However, the wireless channel is insecure and vulnerable to various attacks that pose a great threat to the transmission of sensitive data. Thus, the security mechanism of how the mobile devices and remote cloud server authenticate each other to create a secure session in mobile cloud computing environment has aroused the interest of researchers. In this paper, we propose an efficient and provably secure anonymous two-factor user authentication protocol for the mobile cloud computing environment. The proposed scheme not only provides mutual authentication between mobile devices and cloud computing but also fulfills the known security evaluation criteria. Moreover, utilization of ECC in our scheme reduces the computing cost for mobile devices that are computation capability limited and battery energy limited. In addition, the formal security proof is given to show that the proposed scheme is secure under random oracle model. Security analysis and performance comparisons indicate that the proposed scheme has reasonable computation cost and communication overhead at the mobile client side as well as the server side and is more efficient and more secure than the related competitive works.