A secure framework for enhancing user authentication in cloud environment using biometrics

Cloud is a ubiquitous computing technology dependent on geographically distributed computing entities like storage servers, dedicated systems and softwares. A cloud environment has dedicated systems, servers to provide the service promised by the service providers. As cloud computing is gaining more popularity, more importance is given to security issues such as, authentication, access control, storage, storage security and virtualization. Secure user authentication is one of the main necessities of cloud computing in order to avoid loss for a cloud service provider and to provide secure service to the valid user. A secure biometric based authentication scheme is proposed which provides secure user identification, mutual authentication, session key issue and proxy issue in cases where a single cloud service provider (SP) provides more than one service. Cryptographic algorithm such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography is used for secure key generation and exchange. Freshness is added in the proposed scheme to resist against replay attack. The proposed scheme has optimal communication and computation cost.