Preserving User Privacy with Anonymous Authentication in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing offers its flexibility and dynamic nature in terms of its access to resources anytime and anywhere. All data and other resources in cloud storage are managed and controlled by the Cloud Service Provider. They provide security and ensure that the data is protected and free from any vulnerability. However, providing privacy through authentication mechanism is a big challenge. Most of the current authentication schemes rely on trusted third party to identify and verify user’s credential which can lead to transparency issue. In order to ensure for a secured transaction, they have to preserve user’s privacy from being exposed. The reveal information of user’s credential will make it easier for attacker to gain the information for accessing to classified data. They can intercept and manipulate user’s identity to gain access to sensitive data of user in the cloud storage. This issue can be solved by introducing anonymity features in the authentication scheme by hiding the user’s information as well as to protect the user’s identity from getting abused. Anonymity will protect user’s identity by hiding the real users’ identity during the authentication process especially when users have to deal with third party in their communication. The threat does not only come from external attacker but also comes from internal party who has full authority access to the server. This paper proposed an anonymous authentication scheme which is a combination of password-based authentication and anonymity feature in order to preserve user’s privacy without involving the trusted third party during the authentication process. As a result, it can guarantee a secured transaction with anonymity features to protect user’s privacy. This paper also presents the description of data privacy and security which can influence user’s trust in using cloud services. Security analysis descriptions of possible attacks to the proposed scheme are also presented in this paper. The Secure Remote Password (SRP) protocol is used for this project with some enhancement to algorithm. In the future, the proposed scheme will be tested with some of the possible attack threats to prove that it is secured against the attack. The significant of this research is to preserve user’s privacy with anonymous password-based authentication in the cloud environment without any requirement to trusted third party which can resist from vulnerability to attacks.