Biblio

Cloud computing has helped in managing big data and providing resources remotely and ubiquitously, but it has some latency and security concerns. Fog has provided tremendous advantages over cloud computing which include low latency rate, improved real-time interactions, reduced network traffic overcrowding, and improved reliability, however, security concerns need to be addressed separately. Another major issue in the cloud is Cloud Lock-in/Vendor Lock-in. Through this research, an effort has been made to extend fog computing and Searchable Encryption technologies. The proposed system can reduce the issue of cloud lock-in faced in traditional cloud computing. The SE schemes used in this paper are Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE) and Multi-keyword Ranked Searchable Encryption (MRSE) to achieve confidentiality, privacy, fine-grained access control, and efficient keyword search. This can help to achieve better access control and keyword search simultaneously. An important use of this technique is it helps to prevent the issue of cloud/vendor lock-in. This can shift some computation and storage of index tables over fog nodes that will reduce the dependency on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

The extensive use of the internet and web-based applications spot the multiserver authentication as a significant component. The users can get their services after authenticating with the service provider by using similar registration records. Various protocol schemes are developed for multiserver authentication, but the existing schemes are not secure and often lead towards various vulnerabilities and different security issues. Recently, Zhao et al. put forward a proposal for smart card and user's password-based authentication protocol for the multiserver environment and showed that their proposed protocol is efficient and secure against various security attacks. This paper points out that Zhao et al.'s authentication scheme is susceptive to traceability as well as anonymity attacks. Thus, it is not feasible for the multiserver environment. Furthermore, in their scheme, it is observed that a user while authenticating does not send any information with any mention of specific server identity. Therefore, this paper proposes an enhanced, efficient and secure user authentication scheme for use in any multiserver environment. The formal security analysis and verification of the protocol is performed using state-of-the-art tool “ProVerif” yielding that the proposed scheme provides higher levels of security.

With the emergence of IoT, wearable devices are drawing attention and becoming part of our daily life. These wearable devices collect private information about their wearers. Mostly, a secure authentication process is used to verify a legitimate user that relies on the mobile terminal. Similarly, remote cloud services are used for verification and authentication of both wearable devices and wearers. Security is necessary to preserve the privacy of users. Some traditional authentication protocols are proposed which have vulnerabilities and are prone to different attacks like forgery, de-synchronization, and un-traceability issues. To address these vulnerabilities, recently, Wu et al. (2017) proposed a cloud-assisted authentication scheme which is costly in terms of computations required. Therefore this paper proposed an improved, lightweight and computationally efficient authentication scheme for wearable devices. The proposed scheme provides similar level of security as compared to Wu's (2017) scheme but requires 41.2% lesser computations.