\(l-\)PEES-IMP: lightweight proxy re-encryption-based identity management protocol for enhancing privacy over multi-cloud environment

The user authenticity with proper identification is a significant challenge where the defects on the authenticity scheme can directly influence the sensitive data over the multi-cloud data (environment). It leads to severe information breaches and data loss over the cloud environment. Thus, a cloud user identity management protocol has to be designed in a secured manner using the proxy-encryption scheme, i.e., proxy transmits a cipher to another with a different encryption key by preserving the plain text secrets. Therefore, the intervention of third-party is avoided efficiently. This research provides an identity management protocol based on a proxy re-encryption scheme, an improved version of the existing identity management protocol, and named Lightweight Proxy re-encryption-based identity management protocol (\(l-\) PEES-IMP). It resolves the computational overhead that occurs during the encryption operation performed by the data owners and decryption due to asymmetric mode. It integrates symmetric and asymmetric encryption to establish secure communication. It is applied over the multi-cloud environment to develop privacy and security among sensitive data to avoid data loss or data breaching. It is also a trustworthy identity protocol for service providers and users. It addresses the problem related to the reliance on a third party, commonly identified in existing identity management protocol. Finally, the evaluation of the proposed PEES-IMP is done with existing ECC, RSA, hybrid model and EIDM, and various metrics to guarantee privacy and security of the data. The simulation is performed using MATLAB environment and shows better outcomes compared to prevailing approaches. This model is flexible which can be adopted practically. The encryption time of \(l-\) PEES-IMP is 0.819 ms, decryption time is 3.872 ms and re-encryption time is 28.18 ms which is better compared to other approaches.