Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Tactile Internet-based Tele-Surgery Ecosystem

With the recent advancements in wireless communications, Tactile Internet (TI) has witnessed a major blow. TI is considered the next big evolution that will provide real-time control in industrial setups, particularly in the domain of tele-surgery. However, in remote-surgery ecosystems the transmission of data is prone to different attack vectors. Thus, to realize the true potential of secure tele-surgery under the umbrella of TI, it is required to design a secure authentication and key agreement protocol for tele-surgery. In this paper, we present an effective and secure mutual authentication and session establishment protocol for TI-driven remote surgery setups. The designed protocol enables secure communications between the surgeon, robotic arm, and the trusted authority (TA); where the protocol leverages the advantages of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and biometrics. The protocol operates along the following three phases: i) setup phase, ii) registration phase, and iii) mutual authentication and key agreement phase. During the third phase, the surgeon and the robotic arm mutually authenticate each other with the help of the TA. Further, the security features of the designed protocol have been established using formal and informal means. The obtained results indicate the resiliency of the protocol against offline password guessing attacks, replay attacks, impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, denial of service attacks, etc.