A Time-Bound Ticket-Based Mutual Authentication Scheme for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is becoming popular quickly. In cloud computing, people store their important data in the cloud, which makes it important to ensure the data integrity and availability. Remote data integrity checking enables the client to perform data integrity verification without access to the complete file. This service brings convenience to clients, but degrades the server's performance severely. Proper schemes must be designed to reduce the performance degradation. In this paper, a time-bound ticket-based mutual authentication scheme is proposed for solving this problem. The proposed authentication scheme achieves mutual authentication between the server and the client. The use of time-bound tickets reduces the server's processing overhead efficiently. The correspondence relationship between the digital ticket and the client's smart card prevents user masquerade attack effectively. By security analysis, we show that the proposed scheme is resistant to masquerade attack, replay attack and password guessing attack. By performance analysis, we show that the proposed scheme has good efficiency. The proposed scheme is very suitable for cloud computing.