Elliptic Curve Cryptography with Zero Knowledge Proof based Key Agreement based on Anonymous Identity in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud Computing (CC) is an excellent platform that is widely used to share information as well as services between various departments, customers, and other parties. However, during the transmission of sensitive data, effective security management is essential to ensure data privacy by avoiding unauthorised access. To address this, an efficient key agreement protocol, which is a combination of Elliptic Curve Cryptography with Zero Knowledge Proof (ECC-ZKP) model, is proposed to enhance security management in a cloud environment. The ECC-based encryption model provides equivalent security with much smaller key sizes compared to traditional cryptography approaches. Moreover, this lightweight model reduces computational load and speeds up operations in large-scale cloud environments. The integration of the ZKP model allows users to prove their identity and get access without disclosing any sensitive credentials, which leads to an increase the data confidentiality. Initially, the login and registration of users in the cloud is done by submitting all their details to the service provider. Then, a hash value and bound values are computed, and a secret key is generated by the service provider, which is sent to the client for accessing the data from the cloud. The experiment results of the proposed ECC-ZKP model achieved Makespan of 4.8 ms for 100 tasks, which is better than traditional key agreement models, such as ECC-based authenticated key agreement, respectively.