EdgeAuth: An intelligent token‐based collaborative authentication scheme

Abstract

AbstractEdge computing is regarded as an extension of cloud computing that brings computing and storage resources to the network edge. For some Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications such as supply‐chain supervision and collaboration, Internet of Vehicles, real‐time video analysis and so forth, users should be authenticated before visiting the geographically distributed edge servers. Limited by the considerable latency between the cloud and edge servers, and the limited capacity of edge servers, it is infeasible to copy the authentication method from cloud servers when users are authenticated in edge servers. In view of this challenge, this paper proposes a novel token‐based authentication scheme, named EdgeAuth, that enables fast edge user authentication through collaboration among cloud servers and edge servers. Under the EdgeAuth scheme, edge servers can rapidly verify the credentials of users who have been authenticated by the cloud server. EdgeAuth can also protect users from a series of authentication attacks, for example, the replay attack, DoS attack and man‐in‐the‐middle attack. The results of experiments conducted on a simulated edge computing environment validate the usefulness of EdgeAuth through a comparison in latency and throughput against two baseline schemes.