Two-factor authenticated key exchange (TFAKE) protocols are critical tools for ensuring identity authentication and secure data transmission for cloud computing. Until now, numerous TFAKE protocols based on smart cards and passwords are proposed under this circumstance. Unfortunately, most of them are found insecure against various attacks. Researchers focus on cryptanalysis of these protocols and then fixing the loopholes. Little attention has been paid to design rationales and formal security models of these protocols. In this paper, we summarize the security requirements and put forward a formal security model for TFAKE protocols for cloud computing. We then present an efficient TFAKE protocol without using expensive asymmetric cryptology mechanisms to achieve high efficiency. Our protocol can be proven secure in the random oracle model and achieves user anonymity. Compared with other TFAKE protocols, our protocol is more efficient and enjoys provable security.

Secure and efficient authentication protocols are necessary for cloud service. Multifactor authentication protocols taking advantage of smart card, user’s password, and biometric, are more secure than password-based single-factor authentication protocols which are widely used in practice. However, most of the multiserver authentication protocols may have weak points, such as smart card loss attack, man-in-the-middle attack, anonymity, and high computation cost of authentication center. In order to overcome the above weaknesses, we propose a novel multiserver multifactor authentication protocol based on the Kerberos protocol using the extended Chebyshev chaotic mapping as a cryptographic algorithm. The proposed protocol achieves anonymity without sharing secret keys in advance and needs the user to register with the authentication center only once. Finally, we prove the security of the new protocol with BAN logic and compare it with other multifactor authentication protocols for multiserver environment. The results show that our proposed protocol is more secure and efficient and better for practical application.

Decentralized attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a special form of multiauthority ABE systems, in which no central authority and global coordination are required other than creating the common reference parameters. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized ABE in prime-order groups by using extended dual system groups. We formulate some assumptions used to prove the security of our scheme. Our proposed scheme is fully secure under the standard k -Lin assumption in random oracle model and can support any monotone access structures. Compared with existing fully secure decentralized ABE systems, our construction has shorter ciphertexts and secret keys. Moreover, fast decryption is achieved in our system, in which ciphertexts can be decrypted with a constant number of pairings.

In a decentralized attribute-based encryption (ABE) system, any party can act as an authority by creating a public key and issuing private keys to different users that reflect their attributes without any collaboration. Such an ABE scheme can eliminate the burden of heavy communication and collaborative computation in the setup phase of multiauthority ABE schemes, thus is considered more preferable. Recently in IEEE Transactions Parallel Distributed Systems, Han et al. proposed an interesting privacy-preserving decentralized key-policy ABE scheme, which was claimed to achieve better privacy for users and to be provably secure in the standard model. However, after carefully revisiting the scheme, we conclude that their scheme cannot resist the collusion attacks, hence fails to meet the basic security definitions of the ABE system.

In 2007, LaMacchia et al.proposed the extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) model for authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols. In this paper, we first modify the eCK model by adding a new query to make the adversary can reveal all ephemeral secret information. Then we propose a new efficient and strongly secure AKE protocol in the asymmetric setting, called E-NETS (enhanced NETS) protocol, and prove its security in the modified eCK (meCK) model under the random oracle assumption and the gap Diffie-Hellman assumption.