Message digest as authentication entity for mobile cloud computing

With the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) and virtualization technologies, cloud computing has started to play a key role in the new computation era. Cloud computing can be used to serve a wide range of applications, from personal to organizational, by means of various infrastructure, software, and platform services. However, the ease of access from terminal devices to powerful processing units and information-rich databases makes the cloud susceptible to a variety of different attacks. The widespread use of cloud computing brings with it a hoard of security, privacy and integrity issues. In this paper, we propose an innovative authentication scheme for mobile cloud computing, MDA. The proposed scheme only uses existing hardware and platforms to prevent most of the potential attacks during the authentication process between a mobile device and the cloud. Technically, the encrypted hashed message (i.e. message digest) is employed by MDA to achieve secure authentication. The performance of MDA is evaluated via protocol simulation and security analysis.