A lightweight and secure protocol for teleworking environment

Abstract

The Internet has advanced so quickly that we can now access any service at any time, from any location. As a result of this capability, People around the world can benefit from the popularity and convenience of teleworking systems. Teleworking systems, however, are vulnerable to a range of attacks; as an unauthorized user enters the open communication line and compromises the whole system, that, in turn, creates a big hurdle for the teleworkers. Professional groups have presented numerous mechanisms for the security of teleworking systems to stop any harm, but there are still a lot of security issues like insider, stolen verifier, masquerade, replay, traceability and impersonation threats. In this paper, we propose that one of the security issues with teleworking systems is the lack of a secure authentication mechanism. In order to provide a secure teleworking environment, we have proposed a lightweight and secure protocol to authenticate all the participants and make the requisite services available in an efficient manner. The security analysis of the presented protocol has been investigated formally using the random oracle model (ROM) and ProVerif simulation and informally through illustration/attack discussions. Meanwhile, the performance metrics have been measured by considering computation and communication overheads. Upon comparing the proposed protocol with prior works, it has been demonstrated that our protocol is superior to its competitors. It is suitable for implementation because it achieved a 73% improvement in computation and 34% in communication costs.