A Secure Mutual Authentication Protocol for Cloud Computing Using Secret Sharing and Steganography

Cloud computing is a collection of virtually massive distributed large scale computers to handle enormous enterprise computing, hardware, storage needs. An exponential advancement of communication and information technologies results in substantial traffic for accessing of cloud resources wired and mobile, through various communication devices like desktop, laptop, tabs, etc. via Internet. Significance of enterprise data and increased access rates from low-resource terminal devices demands for reliable and low cost authentication techniques. Lots of researchers have proposed authentication schemes based on password, biometric, steganography etc. with varied efficiencies. In 2014, Nimmy et al proposed a steganography based mutual authentication protocol for cloud computing and claimed that their scheme resists major cryptographic attacks. Unfortunately, in this paper we will show that Nimmy et al is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and Denial of Service attack. As a part of our contribution, we propose a low cost steganography based authentication scheme which is strongly secure and best suited for asymmetric cloud computing environment.