Authentication in Cloud Computing Environment Using Two Factor Authentication

The security is one of the indispensable concerns in the cloud computing. Different authentication and access mechanisms are implemented for different services in the cloud. For uniform strong authentication and obviate the need for password registration, two factor authentication (T-FA) has been proposed. The data owner provides one of the credentials in this is a two tier mechanism. T-FA needs two identities based on what the user knows and what he possesses which is implemented through Software as a Service (SaaS) in the cloud computing environment. However, key-compromise impersonation makes the software only mechanism vulnerable if a server is compromised. This study examines this vulnerability and proposes an identity based signature technique to make T-FA resilient to impersonation attack. Analysis shows that the proposed technique is able to make T-FA mechanism robust to key-compromise impersonation attacks.