Thanks to the sharp improvement in computer science and information technology, we are witnessing the emergence of new mobile-based Internet services such as telemedicine, electronic payments, and smart home management. Due to the rapid growth of mobile services, a single-server architecture that includes one server and multiple clients is not responsive to customer needs. For this reason, architecture was developed with several providers to extend scalability and accessibility. However, as the customer-to-provider communication is done over the Internet, providing a secure communication via efficient and provably secure mutual authentication and key agreement is of great importance. So, a great amount of research has been done to support authentication and key agreement in environments with multiple servers. In this article, we introduce a secure robust elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based three-factor authentication and key agreement scheme for multi-server architecture that is robust to various attacks and meets significant security requirements. We assess the computational complexity and prove that the proposed method generates minimum time complexity and very low communication complexity in comparison with similar methods. Finally, we evaluate and verify the scheme’s security with the official Scyther tool.

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