Secure and Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Mobile Edge Computing Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is progressively being integrated into everyday life, with cloud computing systems being widely employed to monitor and manage IoT devices. Cloud servers offer centralized high-performance processing of large-scale data utilizing millions of connected sensors and geographically distributed devices. Distributed data processing with low latency is important for autonomous driving, healthcare, virtual reality, and augmented reality in cloud services based on 5G technology. mobile edge computing (MEC) infrastructure enables cloud services at the edge of the network in a 5G ecosystem, allowing for real-time processing of large amounts of data. MEC involves an open infrastructure that allows for access by heterogeneous devices, increasing the complexity of security challenge. This, in turn, brings the potential risk of attacks that could result in information leakage and compromise the privacy of users. In extreme cases, attacks may even pose a risk to human life. Thus, an effective authentication mechanism is required to prevent attacks and protect privacy in MEC environments. To address this issue, we propose a secure and anonymous authentication scheme that enhances security in MEC environments. In the proposed scheme, the user and MEC server establish a secure session key without the need of a trusted third party. The proposed scheme is designed to be secure from various known attacks attempted by internal and external adversaries. We have conducted both formal and informal analyses to prove the security of the proposed scheme and compared its performance with related schemes to validate its effectiveness and practical application.