A lightweight two-factor authentication scheme for mobile cloud computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) offers a new world of promise, and can be leveraged to improve the quality of mobile services. MCC brings cloud storage, processing and communication benefits to resource-constrained mobile devices. While MCC adoption is growing significantly, various key challenges need to be addressed to make MCC-based solutions scale and meet the ever-growing demand for more resource intensive applications. The enormous volume of data that is collected from and stored on mobile devices poses information security and privacy concerns for individuals, enterprises and governments. Limited computing and energy resources makes authentication and encryption a challenging task. To preserve user’s privacy and ensure security, MCC establishes authenticated communication sessions between the mobile device and cloud servers. In this position paper, an overview of MCC authentication approaches is presented. Then, a lightweight two-factor, password and smart card, authentication for mobile cloud-connected devices is described. The proposed authentication scheme aims at increasing authentication security by using multi-factors while offloaded computation to the cloud to reduce battery consumption.