An ECC-based lightweight remote user authentication and key management scheme for IoT communication in context of fog computing

Fog computing is a computing structure which is distributed in nature. Low latency, reasonably low communication overhead and ability to support real time applications are the reasons for which fog computing approach said to provide better performance than cloud computing. Although, it is an extension of the cloud computing. Fog computing also inherits some critical security and privacy issues of cloud computing. Secure key management and user authentication are among the key issues faced by fog computing. Various schemes with probable solutions of these issues have been proposed by many authors in this context. Among them, a notable scheme has been presented by Wajid et al. known as SAKA-FC, where authors used three-factor authentication with privacy preservation for remote user based on ECC, hash functions, fuzzy extractor and symmetric bivariate polynomial function. This paper analyses the SAKA-FC protocol and found that it is not resilient against fog server insider attack, message intercept attack and replay attack. Consequently, an improved, lightweight and secure authentication scheme in context of fog-centric IoT communication is proposed in this paper to eradicate all the above mentioned security shortfalls of Wajid et al scheme. The proposed scheme is verified using mathematical security analysis and simulated using AVISPA which proves that the proposed scheme prevents all pertinent security threats. The performance analysis of our scheme proves its effectiveness over other related existing schemes in this context.