A light-weight authentication scheme based on message digest and location for mobile cloud computing

The security of data transmission is of paramount importance to mobile cloud computing. For security purposes, the data transmission in mobile cloud computing typically requires a mutually-authenticated environment for mobile devices and cloud servers. SSH (secure shell) could be used to satisfy the requirement. However, it makes the authentication process computationally expensive for mobile devices because it involves public key cryptosystem and mobile devices are relatively restricted in terms of computation capacity. This places the onus of establishing and maintaining secure communication sessions on the resourceful cloud servers. We propose a novel mutual authentication scheme, “Message Digest and Location based Authentication (MDLA)”, which involves symmetric key operations. In addition to computational simplicity, MDLA achieves integrity through message digest, and ensures the unpredictability of keys using location vector and timestamp.