An enhanced privacy-aware authentication scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing services

With the fast growth of mobile services, Mobile Cloud Computing(MCC) has gained a great deal of attention from researchers in the academic and industrial field. User authentication and privacy are significant issues in MCC environment. Recently, Tsai and Lo proposed a privacy-aware authentication scheme for distributed MCC services, which claimed to support mutual authentication and user anonymity. However, Irshad et.al. pointed out this scheme cannot achieve desired security goals and improved it. Unfortunately, this paper shall show that security features of Irshad et.al.’s scheme are achieved at the price of multiple time-consuming operations, such as three bilinear pairing operations, one map-to-point hash function operation, etc. Besides, it still suffers from two minor design flaws, including incapability of achieving three-factor security and no user revocation and re-registration. To address these issues, an enhanced and provably secure authentication scheme for distributed MCC services will be designed in this work. The proposed scheme can meet all desirable security requirements and is able to resist against various kinds of attacks. Moreover, compared with previously proposed schemes, the proposed scheme provides more security features while achieving lower computation and communication costs.