Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Cloud computing is an advanced resource pooling framework which delivers an economical and more reliable Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions to the industry and academia. Cloud technology helps the stakeholders to avoid initial investment of costly infrastructure setup, licensing new software’s, training new personals and operational cost. Therefore, all size of IT organizations and individuals can make use of the cloud for boosting up their ICT needs. In parallel there has been backlash due to authentication access keys and credentials management issues in this new framework. As a result, in this article we have proposed a robust and privacy preserved Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) scheme with efficient access keys distribution mechanism. The proposed MFA approach integrates the bio-metric fingerprint with user-id, password and One-Time Password (OTP) and upgrades the existing Single Sign-On (SSO) and two-factor authentications to multi-factor authentication. Our investigation not only provides the robust remote authentication in cloud but also preserves the privacy of the authentication credentials. The main shortcoming in our approach is that remote users and cloud service providers must trust the third party trustee. We have analyzed the completeness of our investigation using the GNY (Gong, Needham and Yahalom) logic. Finally, we reported the performance and robustness of our scheme with series of experiments.

Keywords: Authentication, Cloud Computing, Fingerprint, Privacy, Security, Trustee