Security Analysis and Improvement of User Authentication Framework for Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing, as an emerging, virtual, large-scale distributed computing model, has gained increasing attention these years. Meanwhile it also faces many secure challenges, one of which is authentication. In this paper, we firstly analyze a user authentication framework for cloud computing proposed by Amlan Jyoti Choudhury et al and point out the security attacks existing in the protocol. Then we propose an improved user authentication scheme. Our improved protocol ensures user legitimacy before entering into the cloud. The confidentiality and the mutual authentication of our protocol are formally proved by the strand space model theory and the authentication test method. The simulation illustrates that the communication performance of our scheme is efficient.