Lightweight Mutual Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Multi-Access Edge Computing Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography
Abstract
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) relies on edge servers deployed at the data source side to provide low-latency real-time processing and data services for terminal devices. Aiming at the potential security risks in identity authentication between terminals and edge servers, this paper designs a lightweight mutual anonymous authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography. The protocol constructs the authentication procedure using elliptic curve algorithms and hash functions. It achieves mutual identity authentication, terminal anonymity, untraceable behaviors, and can resist various attacks such as replay attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. Performance analysis, including both computational complexity evaluation and simulation-based benchmarking, shows that the proposed protocol reduces terminal-side computation by up to 80.3% compared with pairing-based schemes, while achieving full security properties including mutual authentication, anonymity, untraceability, and resistance to replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. These results demonstrate that our protocol is well-suited for resource-constrained terminals in MEC environments.