An Anonymous and Certificateless Identity Authentication Protocol for Mobile Edge Computing

As the burgeoning development of edge computing networks, more and more devices get access into the networks and attempt to obtain convenient and economical service. Devices, such as on-board sensors, mobile phones, monitoring equipment, are one type which takes a large scale. However, this type of device not only has the characteristics of constrained resources and limited battery power, but is also mobile and fast-moving. Therefore, secure and efficient communication in mobile edge computing (MEC) networks demands additional properties such as real-time, low latency, privacy preservation, and so on. Attempting to solve the aforementioned problems, Xu et al. proposed an anonymous authenticated key agreement scheme, which was proved to be secure under the random oracle security model. Unfortunately, in this article, we will point out that their scheme does not satisfy forward security. A certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol is further designed and proved secure by means of theorems and Scyther tool. The performance of the improved protocol is also evaluated from the aspects of security properties, storage, communication, and computation costs. Compared to several related schemes, it can be concluded that our protocol achieves a good balance between security and efficiency.