Lightweight and Anonymity-Preserving User Authentication Scheme for IoT-Based Healthcare

Internet of Things (IoT) produces massive heterogeneous data from various applications, including digital health, smart hospitals, automated pathology labs, and so forth. IoT sensor nodes are integrated with the medical equipment to enable the health workers to monitor the patients’ health condition and appliances in real time. However, due to security vulnerabilities, an unauthorized user can access health-related information or control the IoT nodes attached to the patient’s body resulting in unprecedented outcomes. Due to wireless channels as a medium of communication, IoT poses several threats such as a denial of service attack, man-in-the-middle attack, and modification attack to the IoT networks’ security and privacy. The proposed research presents a lightweight and anonymity-preserving user authentication protocol to counter these security threats. The given scheme establishes a secure session for the legitimate user and prohibits unauthorized users from gaining access to the IoT sensor nodes. The proposed protocol uses only lightweight cryptography primitives (hash) to alleviate the node’s tiny processor burden. The proposed protocol is efficient and superior because it has low computational and communication costs than conventional protocols. The proposed scheme uses password protection to let only the legitimate user access the IoT sensor nodes to obtain the patient’s real-time health report.