Authentication methods in cloud computing: a survey

Abstract

The study focuses on presenting a review on the various biometric authentication mechanisms in the cloud computing environment. Cloud Computing is used to deliver computing Services over the internet and is used to store data in cloud servers. Due to the sharing of services, privacy and data security have become a major area of concern in cloud computing. The cloud service providers store and maintain client data across data centers which provides threats of data leaks. It is found that several mechanisms have emphasized on data security and in the ensuing process have ignored privacy. Authentication helps to ensure and confirms a user's identity. The existing traditional password authentication does not provide enough security for the data residing in cloud and there have been instances when the password based authentication has been manipulated to gain access into the cloud data. Multifactor authentication is a methodology that uses two or more authentication techniques along with the password but it still does not provide fool-proof data security. Since the conventional methods such as passwords do not serve the purpose of data security, research works focused on biometric traits were as a means of user authentication in cloud services. The biometric authentication is broadly classified into physical based biometric authentication and behavioral based biometric authentication. This paper presents an overview of those methods and analyzes their merits and demerits. The study has been structured to analyze the prevailing biometric authentication mechanisms to gain insights in developing a new authentication model that is more efficient than the existing methods.