A Lightweight Anonymous Authentication and Secure Communication Scheme for Fog Computing Services

Fog-driven IoT architecture located between IoT devices and the centralized cloud infrastructure is introduced to extend computing, storage and network services to the edge of the Internet and therefore resources and services of the fog nodes are available and are closer to the end user and end device for providing mobility, low latency and location awareness. However, the paradigm of fog computing due to its inherited properties from cloud as inherits its security and privacy concerns such as spoofing, message replay, impersonation, man-in-the middle and physical capturing of IoT devices etc. To address these concerns in fog computing services, in this paper, a lightweight anonymous authentication and secure communication scheme is proposed and it only used secure one-way hash function and bitwise XOR operations when cloud, fog and user mutually authenticate each other. After the successful authentication, both fog-based participants can agree on a session key to encrypt the subsequent communication messages. The security can be ensured during authentication process by using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and the performance comparisons with existing schemes demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure and highly efficient.