The week's pick
Reseach Article
MCSAuth: A New Authentication Mechanism for Cloud Systems
| International Journal of Computer Applications |
| Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
| Volume 88 - Number 15 |
| Year of Publication: 2014 |
| Authors: Francois S. N. Athanasios, Sherif F. Fahmy, Gamal I. Selim |
10.5120/15428-3934
|
Francois S. N. Athanasios, Sherif F. Fahmy, Gamal I. Selim . MCSAuth: A New Authentication Mechanism for Cloud Systems. International Journal of Computer Applications. 88, 15 ( February 2014), 23-32. DOI=10.5120/15428-3934
Abstract
Cloud Computing has attracted a lot of attention in both academia and industry lately. With its focus on scaling, collaboration, agility, availability and cost reduction, cloud computing offers a compelling alternative to in-house IT solutions. However, by "outsourcing" the computing infrastructure, it introduces a number of security issues. Specifically, since cloud computing is a shared computing platform, it needs to provide strong mechanisms for authenticating it's users and ensuring that no confidential information stored on the cloud is compromised. This paper addresses a number of vulnerabilities in existing authentication mechanisms and proposes enhancements to mitigate these vulnerabilities. In addition, the paper studies how these enhancements affect performance. The results show that the existing vulnerabilities can be overcome by the proposed mechanisms. However, this results, in the worst case, in a six-fold increase in execution time. This can be considered relatively small when security is prime important.
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