Secure and efficient anonymous authentication scheme for three-tier mobile healthcare systems with wearable sensors

The mobility and openness of wireless communication technologies make Mobile Healthcare Systems (mHealth) potentially exposed to a number of potential attacks, which significantly undermines their utility and impedes their widespread deployment. Attackers and criminals, even without knowing the context of the transmitted data, with simple eavesdropping on the wireless links, may benefit a lot from linking activities to the identities of patient’s sensors and medical staff members. These vulnerabilities apply to all tiers of the mHealth system. A new anonymous mutual authentication scheme for three-tier mobile healthcare systems with wearable sensors is proposed in this paper. Our scheme consists of three protocols: Protocol-1 allows the anonymous authentication nodes (mobile users and controller nodes) and the HSP medical server in the third tier, while Protocol-2 realizes the anonymous authentication between mobile users and controller nodes in the second tier, and Protocol-3 achieves the anonymous authentication between controller nodes and the wearable body sensors in the first tier. In the design of our protocols, the variation in the resource constraints of the different nodes in the mHealth system are taken into consideration so that our protocols make a better trade-off among security, efficiency and practicality. The security of our protocols are analyzed through rigorous formal proofs using BAN logic tool and informal discussions of security features, possible attacks and countermeasures. Besides, the efficiency of our protocols are concretely evaluated and compared with related schemes. The comparisons show that our scheme outperforms the previous schemes and provides more complete and integrated anonymous authentication services. Finally, the security of our protocols are evaluated by using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications and the SPAN animator software. The simulation results show that our scheme is secure and satisfy all the specified privacy and authentication goals.

[1]  Athanasios V. Vasilakos,et al.  Secure Authentication for Remote Patient Monitoring with Wireless Medical Sensor Networks † , 2016, Sensors.

[2]  Ping Wang,et al.  Understanding security failures of two-factor authentication schemes for real-time applications in hierarchical wireless sensor networks , 2014, Ad Hoc Networks.

[3]  Vincent Rijmen,et al.  The Design of Rijndael: AES - The Advanced Encryption Standard , 2002 .

[4]  Soufiene Djahel,et al.  Multidisciplinary approaches to achieving efficient and trustworthy eHealth monitoring systems , 2014, 2014 IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC).

[5]  Michael J. Wiener,et al.  Faster Attacks on Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems , 1998, Selected Areas in Cryptography.

[6]  Qian Li,et al.  Efficient authenticated key exchange protocols for wireless body area networks , 2015, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking.

[7]  Xiong Li,et al.  Cryptanalysis and improvement of a biometrics-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards , 2011, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[8]  Scott A. Vanstone,et al.  Faster Point Multiplication on Elliptic Curves with Efficient Endomorphisms , 2001, CRYPTO.

[9]  Jianfeng Ma,et al.  A privacy preserving three-factor authentication protocol for e-Health clouds , 2016, The Journal of Supercomputing.

[10]  Johann Großschädl,et al.  Efficient Java Implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography for J2ME-Enabled Mobile Devices , 2012, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[11]  Prasan Kumar Sahoo,et al.  Efficient Security Mechanisms for mHealth Applications Using Wireless Body Sensor Networks , 2012, Sensors.

[12]  Jian Shen,et al.  Enhanced secure sensor association and key management in wireless body area networks , 2015, Journal of Communications and Networks.

[13]  Sai Ji,et al.  Towards efficient content-aware search over encrypted outsourced data in cloud , 2016, IEEE INFOCOM 2016 - The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[14]  Sebastian Mödersheim,et al.  The AVISPA Tool for the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications , 2005, CAV.

[15]  Yuan-Ting Zhang,et al.  A design proposal of security architecture for medical body sensor networks , 2006, International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN'06).

[16]  Mohamed F. Younis,et al.  A survey on routing protocols for wireless sensor networks , 2005, Ad Hoc Networks.

[17]  Tanja Lange,et al.  Handbook of Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography , 2005 .

[18]  Jian Shen,et al.  An untraceable temporal-credential-based two-factor authentication scheme using ECC for wireless sensor networks , 2016, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[19]  Muhammad Khurram Khan,et al.  An Authentication Scheme for Secure Access to Healthcare Services , 2012, Journal of Medical Systems.

[20]  Rong Sun,et al.  1-RAAP: An Efficient 1-Round Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks , 2016, Sensors.

[21]  Jian Ma,et al.  A novel smart card and dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme for multi-server environments , 2013, Math. Comput. Model..

[22]  Sherali Zeadally,et al.  Anonymous Authentication for Wireless Body Area Networks With Provable Security , 2017, IEEE Systems Journal.

[23]  Zhenguo Zhao,et al.  An Efficient Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks Using Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem , 2014, Journal of Medical Systems.

[24]  Xingming Sun,et al.  Achieving Efficient Cloud Search Services: Multi-Keyword Ranked Search over Encrypted Cloud Data Supporting Parallel Computing , 2015, IEICE Trans. Commun..

[25]  Sherali Zeadally,et al.  Authentication protocol for an ambient assisted living system , 2015, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[26]  Kyung Sup Kwak,et al.  Certificateless Remote Anonymous Authentication Schemes for WirelessBody Area Networks , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[27]  Jian Ma,et al.  An efficient and security dynamic identity based authentication protocol for multi-server architecture using smart cards , 2012, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[28]  JAMAL N. AL-KARAKI,et al.  Routing techniques in wireless sensor networks: a survey , 2004, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[29]  Di Liu,et al.  A Stationary Wavelet Transform Based Approach to Registration of Planning CT and Setup Cone beam-CT Images in Radiotherapy , 2014, Journal of Medical Systems.

[30]  Zhihua Xia,et al.  A Privacy-Preserving and Copy-Deterrence Content-Based Image Retrieval Scheme in Cloud Computing , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[31]  Arjen K. Lenstra,et al.  Selecting Cryptographic Key Sizes , 2000, Journal of Cryptology.

[32]  Xiong Li,et al.  Anonymous mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for wearable sensors in wireless body area networks , 2017, Comput. Networks.

[33]  Zhe Liu,et al.  Efficient Implementation of NIST-Compliant Elliptic Curve Cryptography for 8-bit AVR-Based Sensor Nodes , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[34]  Jheng-Jia Huang,et al.  ROBUST AND PRIVACY PROTECTION AUTHENTICATION IN CLOUD COMPUTING , 2013 .

[35]  Jin-Meng Ho,et al.  A versatile suite of strong authenticated key agreement protocols for body area networks , 2012, 2012 8th International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC).

[36]  Zhiguang Qin,et al.  Revocable and Scalable Certificateless Remote Authentication Protocol With Anonymity for Wireless Body Area Networks , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[37]  Xiong Li,et al.  An enhanced smart card based remote user password authentication scheme , 2013, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[38]  Abdul Hanan Abdullah,et al.  Smart Environment as a Service: Three Factor Cloud Based User Authentication for Telecare Medical Information System , 2013, Journal of Medical Systems.

[39]  Muhammad Khurram Khan,et al.  Cryptanalysis and Improvement of ‘A Privacy Enhanced Scheme for Telecare Medical Information Systems’ , 2012, Journal of Medical Systems.

[40]  Alex Mihailidis,et al.  A Survey on Ambient-Assisted Living Tools for Older Adults , 2013, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

[41]  Li Xu,et al.  Further Observations on Smart-Card-Based Password-Authenticated Key Agreement in Distributed Systems , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[42]  Mohamed F. Younis,et al.  Efficient aggregation of delay-constrained data in wireless sensor networks , 2005, The 3rd ACS/IEEE International Conference onComputer Systems and Applications, 2005..

[43]  Singh Vijendra,et al.  Efficient Clustering for High Dimensional Data: Subspace Based Clustering and Density Based Clustering , 2011 .

[44]  Muhammad Khurram Khan,et al.  Cryptanalysis and Improvement of Authentication and Key Agreement Protocols for Telecare Medicine Information Systems , 2014, Journal of Medical Systems.

[45]  Upkar Varshney,et al.  Pervasive Healthcare: Applications, Challenges And Wireless Solutions , 2005, Commun. Assoc. Inf. Syst..

[46]  Husen Wang,et al.  Elliptic Curve Cryptography with Efficiently Computable Endomorphisms and Its Hardware Implementations for the Internet of Things , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Computers.