Deniable-Based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Against Location Leakage in Edge Computing

Edge computing provides cloud services at the edge of the network for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It aims to address low latency of the network and alleviates data processing of the cloud. This “cloud-edge-device” paradigm brings convenience as well as challenges for location-privacy protection of the IoT. In the edge computing environment, the fixed edge equipment supplies computing services for adjacent IoT devices. Therefore, edge computing suffers location leakage as the connection and authentication records imply the location of IoT devices. This article focuses on the location awareness in the edge computing environment. We adopt the “deniability” of authentication to prevent location leakage when IoT devices connect to the edge nodes. In our solution, an efficient deniable authentication based on a two-user ring signature is constructed. The robustness of authentication makes the fixed edge equipment accept the legal end devices. Besides, the deniability of authentication cannot convince any third party that the fact of this authentication occurred as communication transcript is no longer an evidence for this connection. Therefore, it handles the inherent location risk in edge computing. Compared to efficient deniable authentications, our protocol saves 10.728% and 14.696% computational cost, respectively.