Cloud computing represents the latest technology that has revolutionized the world of business. It is a promising solution giving companies the possibility of remotely storing their data and accessing services whenever they are needed and at a lower cost. However, outsourcing IT resources also brings risks, especially for sensitive information in terms of security and privacy, since all data and resources stored in the cloud are managed and controlled by cloud service providers. On the other hand, cloud users would like cloud service providers not to know what services being accessed and how often they are using them. Therefore, designing mechanisms to protect privacy is a major challenge. One promising research area is via authentication mechanisms, which has attracted many researchers in this delicate subject. For this, several solutions have been devised and published recently to tackle this problem. Nevertheless, these solutions often suffer from different types of attacks, high computing and communication costs, and the use of complex key management schemes. To address these shortcomings, we propose an approach that ensures the optimal preservation of the privacy of cloud users to protect their personal data including identities. The suggested approach gives the cloud user the ability to access and use the services provided by cloud service providers anonymously without the providers of those services knowing their identity. We demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over several anonymous authentication solutions in terms of computation and communication costs.
Smart grids represent the latest trend that has disrupted the energy supplier sector. They are in the form of smart meters that automatically communicate power consumption data to the power grid operator. In fact, the smart-grid technology is a great solution for energy suppliers and their end customers, enabling them to perform more frequent measurements of energy, monitor their consumption and thus control the amount of their energy bills. Although the smart-grid technology brings significant gains in performance and economy to its users. However, this advanced technology immediately raises different types of attacks that can adversely affect the operation of smart grids by falsifying electricity consumption data transmitted between smart meters and the power distribution server and therefore through the generation of incorrect energy billing invoices. The reflection carried out in the proposed approach is part of this problem. It is particularly concerned with realising a new privacy-protected authenticated key agreement scheme for secure communication between smart meters and energy providers. The conducted experiments show that the proposed authentication scheme exceeds its competitors in terms of calculation costs and resistance to various types of attacks.
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