Lightweight Authentication Technique for Secure Communication of Edge/Fog Data-Centers

Abstract

Edge computing has significantly enhanced the capabilities of cloud computing. Edge datacentres are used for storing data of the end-user devices. Secure communication between the
legitimate edge data-centres during the load balancing process has attracted industrial and
academic researchers. Recently, Puthal et al. have proposed a technique for authenticating edge
datacenters to enable secure load balancing. However, the resource-constraint nature of the
edge data-centres is ignored. The scheme is characterized by complex computation and memory
intensive cryptographic protocol. It is also vulnerable to key escrow attack because the secret
key used for encrypting and decrypting of the communicated messages is been created by the
trusted cloud datacenter. Additionally, the key sharing phase of their algorithm is complex.
Therefore, to address the highlighted challenges, this paper proposed a lightweight key escrowless authentication algorithm that will ensure secure communication of resource-constrained
edge data-centres during the load balancing process. The security capability of the proposed
scheme has been formally evaluated using the automatic cryptographic analytical tool ProVerif.
The relatively low computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme compared to
the benchmark schemes proved that it is lightweight, thus suitable for resource-constrained edge
datacenters.