ECC-based anti-phishing protocol for cloud computing services

Cloud is the next generation computing platform. Cloud computing provides dynamically scalable virtualised computing resources as a service over the internet. It is a technology that provides software, computation, data access and storage services at a relatively low cost to the users. Cloud servers store enormous amount of crucial data which are vital for cloud computing services. Therefore, it becomes essential to authenticate the legitimate users of the cloud before they can access this data. Phishing attacks are the most popular in twenty-first century cyber crime which are becoming more sophisticated and therefore are a major threat to cloud computing services. In this paper, we propose a password-based anti-phishing protocol which authenticates the legitimate users of the cloud. The proposed protocol is based on the cutting edge technology of elliptic curve cryptography and therefore offers best security at a low cost.