Authenticating users and establishing their identity is the first most part of any computer based application or website. This has to be the most significant point from the security aspect. With the emergence of cloud platforms and their services, our interaction with data, devices, software and applications is witnessing an unprecedented change. This issue of user authentication tops the list of threats posed by the cloud computing paradigm. In most of the applications, users are supposed to remember multiple passwords and usernames for different services offered by Cloud Service Providers (CSP's). The rise in brute force attacks makes this username-password scheme weak and thus users and organizations expect that there are multiple parameters to be passed before the user actually gets authenticated and his identity is established. The development of such two tier schemes indeed enhances the security but right now it is in its early stages. techniques such as use of Biometrics like fingerprinting, iris scanning, face recognition methods, hardware based approaches like One-time-passwords(OTP), hardware tokens and bypass methods are being proposed by researchers and industry professionals and are under continuous developments and improvements. On the lines of two tier component authentication, this paper proposes a simple, convenient & secure hardware based two tier technique using Universal Serial Bus (USB). Our proposed model provides solution to the limitations posed by the hardware based OTP scheme where a user is supposed to enter a pin or password, received on their mobile handset, on the web portal of the Cloud Service Provider. In this way, our scheme defies the possibility of a phishing attack and brute force attack by any intruder of stealing that OTP or pin and misusing it.

1. M. Armbrust, A. Fox, R. Griffith, A. D. Joseph, R. Katz, A. Konwinski, G. Lee, D. Patterson, A. Rabkin, I. Stoica, and M. Zaharia, "A View of Cloud Computing," Communications of the ACM Magazine, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 50–58, April 2010.
2. F. Fatemi Moghaddam, Secure Cloud Computing with Client-Based Control System: Protection of Stored Cloud-Based Data by Increasing End-User's Role, Chapter 1: Cloud Computing, 1st Edition. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP), 2013, pp. 9-2.
3. D. G. Chandra, and R. S. Bhadoria, "Cloud Computing Model for National E-governance Plan (NeGP)," in Proc. 4th International Conf. on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN), Mathura, 2012, pp. 520-524.
4. F. Fatemi Moghaddam, M. T. Alrashdan, and O. Karimi, "A Hybrid Encryption Algorithm Based on RSA Small-e and Efficient-RSA for Cloud Computing Environments," Journal of Advances in Computer Networks, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 238–241, 2013.
5. F. Fatemi Moghaddam, M. T. Alrashdan, and O. Karimi, "A Comparative Study of Applying Real-Time Encryption in Cloud Computing Environments," in Proc. IEEE 2nd International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet), San Francisco, USA, November 2013
6. S. Subashini and V. Kavitha, "A survey on security issues in service delivery models of cloud computing", Journal of Network and Computer Applications, Vol. 34, No. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 1-11.
7. M. Zhou, Z. Rong, W. Xie, W. Qian, and A. Zhou , "Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing: A Survey", Proc. of the Sixth International Conference Semantics Knowledge and Grid ( SKG'10), Beijing, China, Nov. 2010, pp. 105-112.
8. S. Shin, K. Kobara, and H. Imai, "A Secure Construction for Threshold Anonymous Password-Authenticated Key Exchange", IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals, Vol. E91-A, No. 11, 2008, pp. 3312-3323.
9. A. Jain and L. Hong, "On-line fingerprint verification", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 19, 1997, pp. 302-314.
10. M. Abdalla, M. Izabachene, and D. Pointcheval, "Anonymous and Transparent Gateway-Based Password-Authenticated Key Exchange", Proc. International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security (CANS'08), Hong Kong, China, Dec. 2008, pp. 133-148.
11. A. A. Yassin, H. Jin, A. Ibrahim, W. Qiang, D. Zou, "A Practical Privacypreserving Password authentication Scheme for Cloud Computing", Proc. of the IEEE 26th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops & PhD Forum (IPDPSW'12), May 2012, Shanghai, China, pp. 1204-1211.
12. D. Q. Viet, A. Yamamura, and T. Hidema, "Anonymous Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange", Proc. of 6th International Conference on Cryptology in India (Indocryp'05), Bangalore, India, Dec. 2005, pp. 233- 257.
13. D. Florencio and C. Herley, "One-Time Password Access to Any Server Without Changing the Server", Proc. of the International Supercomputing Conference(ISC'08), Taipei, Taiwan, 2008, pp. 401-420.
14. D. Balfanz and E. W. Felten, "Hand-held computers can be better smart cards", Proc. of the 8th Conference on USENIX Security Symposium, Washington, D. C, USA, 1999, pp. 3-11.
15. S. Jeon , H. S. Kim, and M. S. Kim, "Enhanced Biometrics-based Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards", J. of Security Engineering, Vol. 8, No. 2, Apr. 2011, pp. 237-254.
16. W. S. Juang, "Efficient password authenticated key agreement using smart cards", J. of Computers and Security, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 167-173, 2004.
17. M. L. Das, A. Saxena, and V. P. Gulati, "A dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme", IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 629-631, 2004.
18. H. Y. Chien, J. K. Jan, and Y. M Tseng, "An efficient and practical solution to remote authentication: smart card", J. of Computers and Security, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 372-375, 2002.
19. V. Sulochana and R. Parimelazhagan, "A puzzle based authentication scheme for cloud computing," International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology, IJCTT, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 210-213, Dec. 2013
20. P. Rewagad and Y. Pawar, "Use of digital signature with diffie hellman key exchange and AES encryption algorithm to enhance data security in cloud computing," International Conference on Communication Systems and Network Technologies, CSNT, IEEE, pp. 437-439, 2013.
21. S. E. Arasu, B. Gowri and S. Ananthi, "Privacy-preserving public auditing in cloud using HMAC algorithm," International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering, IJRTE, vol. 2, issue 1, Mar. 2013.
22. M. Singh and S. Singh, "Design and implementation of multi-tier authentication scheme in cloud," International Journal of Computer Science Issues, IJCSI, vol. 9, issue 5, no. 2, Sep. 2012.
23. S. Kumar and A. Ganpati, "Multi-authentication for cloud security: A framework," International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Technology, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 295 303, Apr. 2014.
24. P. Kalpana and S. Singaraju,, "Data security in cloud computing using RSA algorithm," International Journal of Research in Computer and Communication technology, IJRCCT, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 143-146, Sep. 2012.
25. P. Rajvanshi et al, "Data Protection in Cloud Computing", International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE) ISSN: 2278-3075, Volume-3, Issue-3, August 2013
26. B Wang et al, "Storing Shared Data on the Cloud via Security-Mediator", IEEE 33rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems ISSN 1063-6927, 8-11 July, 2013, Page(s) 124-133,
27. L. B. Jivanadham et al, "Cloud Cognitive Authenticator (CCA): A public cloud computing authentication mechanism", International Conference on Informatics, Electronics & Vision (ICIEV), Print ISBN: 978-1-4799-0397-9 17-15 May 2013, Page(s): 1 – 6

Authentication Multifarious Usb Cloud