On the Design of Provably Secure Lightweight Remote User Authentication Scheme for Mobile Cloud Computing Services

Secure and efficient lightweight user authentication protocol for mobile cloud computing becomes a paramount concern due to the data sharing using Internet among the end users and mobile devices. Mutual authentication of a mobile user and cloud service provider is necessary for accessing of any cloud services. However, resource constraint nature of mobile devices makes this task more challenging. In this paper, we propose a new secure and lightweight mobile user authentication scheme for mobile cloud computing, based on cryptographic hash, bitwise XOR, and fuzzy extractor functions. Through informal security analysis and rigorous formal security analysis using random oracle model, it has been demonstrated that the proposed scheme is secure against possible well-known passive and active attacks and also provides user anonymity. Moreover, we provide formal security verification through ProVerif 1.93 simulation for the proposed scheme. Also, we have done authentication proof of our proposed scheme using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. Since the proposed scheme does not exploit any resource constrained cryptosystem, it has the lowest computation cost in compare to existing related schemes. Furthermore, the proposed scheme does not involve registration center in the authentication process, for which it is having lowest communication cost compared with existing related schemes.