Design and Analysis of Mutual Authentication Scheme in Multiserver Environment

Abstract

The advancement of network technology has changed the world’s perspective toward the Internet. The growth of the Internet and telecommunication technology has facilitated several remote access to the server while being located anywhere. Remote access is essential for providing various Internet services like telecommuting, banking, gaming, shopping, etc. However, the protection of user credentials’ privacy and the provision of several remote services using an insecure channel is a critical issue. Thus, mutual authentication and session key security are the vital characteristics of a remote access security policy. Mutual authentication is a user-friendly and scalable mechanism to establish secure and authorized communication between the remote entities over the insecure network. This dissertation focuses on the design and analysis of the variants of user authentication schemes along with their applications. The authentication schemes based on smart card and biometric have been suggested for the multi-server environment, cloud environment, and fog environment. The first contribution presents a new smart card-based authentication scheme for the multi-server environment (SMASME). The proposed scheme maintains a low computational and communicational cost as it uses only exclusive-or (XOR) and hash function. Besides, SMASME ensures better security and efficiency as compared to other existing approaches. In the second contribution, a biometric-based authentication scheme (BMASME) is suggested for a multi-server environment using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to resolve the smart card-based issues. The scheme achieves user anonymity, session key security, and several security features during communication. Nowadays, the cloud is becoming an important paradigm due to cost efficiency, scalability, availability, and high resource utilization. Thus, the authentication scheme for the cloud server environment is more challenging and has become an active area of research. The third contribution hence proposes a biometric-based authentication scheme referred to as (BMASCE) for healthcare applications in the cloud environment. Since the patient’s information is sensitive and must not be revealed to others except the healthcare professionals, the protection of patients’ privacy has become another key issue for health care applications. Thus, mutual authentication with anonymity property is the most basic and commonly used method to resolve security and privacy issues. The BMASCE has low computation cost, computational cost, and several security features compared to other existing schemes. In the final contribution, an efficient ECC based authentication scheme called (BMASFE) is designed to resolve the cloud server issues. This study also focuses on the development of Intra fog and Inter fog communication for latency reduction. The comparison among BMASFE and other related existing user authentication schemes in
the context of security functionality, communication, and computation costs show that the scheme is efficient. The mutual authentication of the proposed schemes is proved with the help of Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic. In addition, the session key security is proved under Real-or-Random (RoR) model. The informal security analysis of the proposed schemes proves that the scheme is secure against possible other known attacks. Furthermore, the formal verification of the proposed schemes is simulated using a widely accepted and powerful AVISPA tool, which confirms the schemes are safe and secure.