An efficient privacy-aware authentication scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing services without bilinear pairings ^*

Constructing efficient privacy-aware authentication scheme for Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) services environment has been an important research topic with ever-increasing mobile devices. However, to the best of our knowledge, most of the schemes for MCC services use heavy bilinear pairings and map-to-point hash operations, which are two very time-consuming operations in modern public key cryptography. In this work, we construct an efficient privacy-aware authentication scheme for MCC services using elliptic curve cryptography. As a result, due to the fact that no bilinear pairings and map-to-point hash operations are involved in the execution, the proposed scheme has much better computation and communication efficiencies than existing related schemes. Detailed performance analysis shows that the computation and the communication costs of our scheme are about 17.44 and 10.64% less than that of the most effective related schemes. Besides, the security analysis shows that our scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model.