Abstract

The blistering growth of the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) has enabled the smooth usage of omnipresent services, but it poses a great security issue because of the intrinsic resource limitations of mobile devices. Conventional authentication systems based on either large key sizes or heavy modular exponentiation are expensive in terms of computation and energy usage for a mobile device. In this paper, a lightweight mutual authentication protocol that can be applied in a mobile cloud environment is proposed, based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and 1-way hash functions that can be used to provide high levels of security at minimum overhead. In order to determine the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, an extensive statistical and performance study was done. Comparative results indicate that the protocol reduces computational latency by approximately 35-40% compared to standard RSA-based frameworks. In particular, processing time on the mobile client side will be kept at less than 15ms, keeping battery life intact. From a communication perspective, the protocol minimizes the exchange to three messages, reducing total bit-overhead by 28%. Performance evaluations using the BETH and Multi-Cloud Kaggle datasets show that the proposed protocol decreases computational delay by more than 90% compared to traditional RSA-2048 frameworks, while achieving a 98.5% throughput success rate even under high traffic conditions. The protocol is also checked through formal security verification with BAN Logic and AVISPA simulation tools and found to be resistant to common attack vectors, such as Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), replay attacks, and impersonation. More statistical testing additionally shows that the keys created by the generated session have high levels of entropy and guarantee Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). The results indicate that the suggested protocol offers the best tradeoff ratio between the security level and operation efficiency and is, therefore, very appropriate in real-time mobile cloud applications in which the latency and the life of the device matter.