An Effective and Secure User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme in m-Healthcare Systems

In mobile healthcare system, the medical user's physiological signals are gathered by the body sensor networks and transferred to the mobile devices via Bluetooth, Zigbee and so on. This in turn is transmitted to remote healthcare center via 3G or 4G networks. With this information provided by the medical user, the medical professionals assist them and save users lives. This information are very sensitive and the networks are always vulnerable to security attacks, such as unauthorized user may gain access to systems information, corrupt the data, and degrade the networks performance are few examples. However the development of the existing m-healthcare systems are mainly focused on the implementation of system functions and the security issues were often neglected. Another critical issue is efficiency, cost effectiveness, and energy consumption in m-healthcare system. Consequently, we would like to introduce a secure and effective user authentication and key agreement scheme in m-Healthcare system to reduce the computation and communication cost. The main steps of secure authentication and key agreement in m-healthcare system are: registration, login, secure authentication and key update. Through the performance evaluation, our scheme is robust and more suitable for m-healthcare service applications and its computation and communication efficient.