An Anonymous Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for Fog Computing

An identity preserving mutual authentication scheme between fog users and fog servers is an important and challenging issue in fog computing, because unlike cloud servers, fog servers and fog users may be malicious. Such a scheme should retain the true identity of the user from the opponent, because otherwise, the opponent will be able to track which fog user and fog server are communicating. This article proposes a safe and effective anonymous mutual authentication scheme between the fog user and the fog server at the edge of the network. In our solution, with the help of the registration authority (RA), they can authenticate each other and agree on a new session key, which will be used to encrypt messages in the session. Fog users can roam freely in the network and can authenticate to any fog server within its range without re-registering with RA. The proposed scheme requires few symmetric encryption/decryption and one-way hash functions, so that it can be efficiently implemented for resource-constrained fog user’s devices. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the existing scheme, in which the proposed scheme can withstand multiple attacks (known plaintext attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, session hijacking, etc.). Finally, the proposed scheme is verified using the widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. The results show that our protocol can safely resist various attacks and can achieve the expected goals. Moreover, the proposed scheme is practically experimented using the NS3 simulator.