Recently, a number of authentication protocols integrated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have been proposed for secure access control on large-scale IoT networks. In this paper, we carefully analyze Amin et al.’s authentication protocol for IoT-enabled devices in distributed cloud computing environment and find that Amin et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to several weaknesses. The main shortcoming of Amin et al.’s protocol is in authentication phase; a malicious cloud server can counterfeit the cloud server chosen by a user, and the control server cannot find this counterfeit. To overcome the shortcomings of Amin et al.’s protocol, we propose an improved protocol. In the registration phase of the improved protocol, the pseudoidentity and real identity of a user or a cloud server are bundled up with the control server’s secret numbers. This measure can effectively prevent impersonation attack. We also compare the improved protocol with several existing authentication protocols in security and computational efficiency.

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