| Summary: | Edge computing has significantly enhanced the capabilities of cloud computing. Edge data-centres are used for storing data of the end-user devices. Secure communication between the legitimate edge data-centres during the load balancing process has attracted industrial and academic researchers. Recently, Puthal et al. have proposed a technique for authenticating edge datacenters to enable secure load balancing. However, the resource-constraint nature of the edge data-centres is ignored. The scheme is characterized by complex computation and memory intensive cryptographic protocol. It is also vulnerable to key escrow attack because the secret key used for encrypting and decrypting of the communicated messages is been created by the trusted cloud datacenter. Additionally, the key sharing phase of their algorithm is complex. Therefore, to address the highlighted challenges, this paper proposed a lightweight key escrow-less authentication algorithm that will ensure secure communication of resource-constrained edge data-centres during the load balancing process. The security capability of the proposed scheme has been formally evaluated using the automatic cryptographic analytical tool ProVerif. The relatively low computation and communication costs of the proposed scheme compared to the benchmark schemes proved that it is lightweight, thus suitable for resource-constrained edge datacenters. © 2020 SERSC.
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