A Security-Enhanced Certificateless Anonymous Authentication Scheme With High Computational Efficiency for Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), as a new computing paradigm, provides high-quality and low-latency services for mobile users and also reduces the load on cloud servers. However, MEC faces some security threats, such as data leakage, privacy leakage, and unauthorized access. To cope with these threats, many researchers have designed a series of identity-based authentication and key negotiation (ID-AKA) schemes for MEC environments. However, these schemes have some drawbacks, such as key escrow issues, lack of unlinkability and full anonymity, use of time-consuming bilinear pairing operations and insufficiently secure static public-private key pairs. To compensate for these drawbacks, we propose a certificateless anonymous authentication scheme for MEC with enhanced security and high computational efficiency. The scheme achieves unlinkability and full anonymity by using one-time pseudonyms generated by a tamper-proof device (TPD). The scheme also solves the key escrow problem and uses one-time public-private key pairs for authentication, thus enhancing the key security and communication security. In addition, the scheme eliminates bilinear pairing operations and precomputes some time-consuming operations in the TPD each time, thus optimizing the computational efficiency. Finally, we perform the security analysis and performance evaluation of the scheme. The results show that the scheme has the optimal computational efficiency and moderate communication costs, as well as significant advantages in terms of security, as compared to other competing schemes.