EECDH to prevent MITM attack in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has reached the peak of Gartner hype cycle, and now the focus of the whole telecom industry is the ability to scale data storage with minimal investment. But data privacy and communication issues will occur with the increment of the cloud data storage. The key privacy concern for scalability is caused by the dynamic membership allocation and multi-owner data sharing. This paper addresses the issues faced by multiple owners through a mutual authentication mechanism using the Enhanced Elliptic Curve Diffie - Hellman (EECDH) key exchange protocol along with the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). The proposed EECDH scheme is used to exchange the secured shared key among multiple owners and also to eliminate the Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks with less computational complexity. By leveraging these algorithms, the integrity of data sharing among multiple owners is ensured. The EECDH improves the level of security only slightly increasing the time taken to encrypt and decrypt the data, and it is secured against the MITM attacks, which is experimented using the AVISPA tool. Keywords: Cloud computing, Multi-owner, Diffie-hellman key exchange protocol, Elliptic curve digital signature algorithm, Station to station protocol, Enhanced elliptic curve diffie hellman