Dynamic reciprocal authentication protocol for mobile cloud computing

Abstract

A combination of mobile and cloud computing delivers many advantages such as mobility, resources, and accessibility through seamless data transmission via the Internet anywhere at any time. However, data transmission through vulnerable channels poses security threats such as man-in-the-middle, playback, impersonation, and asynchronization attacks. To address these threats, we define an explicit security model that can precisely measure the practical capabilities of an adversary. A systematic methodology consisting of 16 evaluation criteria is used for comparative evaluation, thereby leading other approaches to be evaluated through a common scale. Finally, we propose a dynamic reciprocal authentication protocol to secure data transmission in mobile cloud computing. In particular, our proposed protocol develops a secure reciprocal authentication method, which is free of Diffie–Hellman limitations, and has immunity against basic or sophisticated known attacks. The protocol utilizes multi-factor authentication of usernames, passwords, and a one-time password. The password is automatically generated and regularly updated for every connection. The proposed protocol is implemented and tested using Java to demonstrate its efficiency in authenticating communications and securing data transmitted in the mobile cloud computing environment. Results of the evaluation process indicate that compared with the existing works, the proposed protocol possesses obvious capabilities in security and in communication and computation costs.