Design and analysis of authenticated key agreement scheme in cloud-assisted cyber-physical systems

Abstract With advancements in engineering and science, the application dimensions of Cyber–Physical System (CPS) are increasing due to their improving efficiency, safety, reliability, usability and autonomy. By providing on-demand access to shared processing resources, cloud computing reduces infrastructure costs. Ensuring quality of service and information privacy and security is important in such environments. In this paper, we design a new authentication scheme related to the cloud-assisted CPS in two directions: (1) authentication between a user and a cloud server, and (2) authentication between a smart meter and a cloud server. In the former situation, any external party (user) can access the information stored in a cloud server provided that the user is legal and has the right to access information. In the later situation, a smart meter and a cloud server authentication is needed for secure communication of data stored in the cloud server. In both cases, both entities first mutually authenticate each other and only after successful authentication with the help of a trusted authority, establish a session key for their future secure communication. The proposed scheme deals with both the cases and provides high security as compared to other related works, which is shown through formal and informal security analysis. In addition, the mutual authentication using the widely-accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN logic) and also formal security verification using the broadly-used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation tool demonstrate further that the scheme is strong in security. Finally, the proposed scheme is shown to be efficient in terms of communication and computation costs as compared to those for other related existing schemes.