Efficient hierarchical multi-server authentication protocol for mobile cloud computing

With the development of communication technologies, various mobile devices and different types of mobile services became available. The emergence of these services has brought great convenience to our lives. The multi-server architecture authentication protocols for mobile cloud computing were proposed to ensure the security and availability between mobile devices and mobile services. However, most of the protocols did not consider the case of hierarchical authentication. In the existing protocol, when a mobile user once registered at the registration center, he/she can successfully authenticate with all mobile service providers that are registered at the registration center, but real application scenarios are not like this. For some specific scenarios, some mobile service providers want to provide service only for particular users. For this reason, we propose a new hierarchical multi-server authentication protocol for mobile cloud computing. The proposed protocol ensures only particular types of users can successfully authenticate with certain types of mobile service providers. The proposed protocol reduces computing and communication costs by up to 42.6% and 54.2% compared to two superior protocols. The proposed protocol can also resist the attacks known so far. © 2020 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.