A Lightweight and Efficient Remote Data Authentication Protocol Over Cloud Storage Environment

Cloud storage services need cost-effective, independent, and scalable functionality to manage data. Cloud repositories provide an opportunity to manage and access essential data conveniently. This article proposes a secure authentication protocol to resolve these issues. To add a convenient sharing of data controlled by a data delegator, we use symmetric encryption and decryption algorithms in which cloud servers encrypt and decrypt the data to control the accessibility of the user. Furthermore, informal security analysis demonstrates that our devised protocol is robust enough to resist various attacks. We present the formal analysis of security using the Random Oracle Model (ROM) to evaluate and prove the security strength of the devised protocol. The proposed and related protocols have been implemented on an online cloud server named PythonAnywhere with PyCrypto and Time libraries using Python with the help of a system that has predefined specifications to compare the performance. The results show that our scheme has feasible computation, storage, communication, and energy efficiency compared to various related protocols.