Research On Secure Authentication Mechanism For Cloud Computing Environment

User authentication is the verification process for true identity of the users,which is the premise of the system security strategies and protection.As an emerging technology to offer services through the Internet,cloud computing puts forward a high request to the security and efficiency of the authentication ability,owning to the large scale of users and authentication requirements.Existing solutions can not take into account these two requirements.The current solutions are mainly digital certificates based,but due to its inherent complexity in hardware and computing,cloud users are allocated high workload.Therefore,the research of secure authentication mechanism for cloud computing environment possesses strong theory meaning and practice meaning.Although Kerberos-based mechanisms can preserve low consumption,they are prone to password attacks and replay attacks.In this paper,a new Kerberos-based authentication protocol for single cloud(KAPSC)is proposed,which can resist password and replay attacks with low computational cost.Based on previous authentication model,this protocol is implemented by re-factoring the authentication architecture with two more verification exchanges of user identity.Morever,the technique of random numbers is integrated into this KAPSC protocol,which offers another guarantee against replay attacks.Experimental results show that this protocol can improve the security level with an acceptably low overhead cost.According to the scenario with multiple clouds,including private clouds,public clouds,and hybrid clouds,a complete solution to achieve cross-cloud authentication is proposed.Depending on whether the cloud users and server are in the same cloud authentication realm,and whether the two cloud authentication realms share a trust relationship,the scheme employs appropriate strategies respectively.By introduced the home KDC as proxy of the client,this scheme can release much of the client's workload and increase the system scalability.Corresponding experimental results verify the effectiveness and security of the proposed scheme.