An efficient and provably secure authenticated key agreement scheme for mobile edge computing

Though Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technologies have brought more convenience to mobile services over past few years, but security concerns like mutual authentication, user anonymity, user untraceability, etc., have yet remained unresolved. In recent years, many efforts have been made to design security protocols in the context of MCC and MEC, but most of them are prone to security threats. In this paper, we analyze Jia et al.’s scheme, one of the latest authentication protocols for MEC environment and we show this scheme is vulnerable to user impersonation and ephemeral secret leakage attacks. Further, we demonstrate that the aforementioned attacks can be similarly applied to Li et al.’s scheme, which recently derived from Jia et al.’s protocol. In this paper, we propose a provably secure authenticated key agreement protocol based on Jia et al.’s scheme that not only withstands security weaknesses of it, but also offers low computational and communicational costs compared to the other related schemes. As a formal security proof, we simulate our scheme with widely used AVISPA tool. Moreover, we show the scalability and practicality of our scheme in an MEC environment through NS-3 simulation.