An Authentication Protocol for the Medical Internet of Things

Abstract

The progress in biomedical sensors, Internet of Things technologies, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence is leading the development of e-health medical systems, offering a range of new and innovative services. One such service is remote patient monitoring, where medical professionals are able to collect and examine a patient’s medical data remotely. Of course, in these systems, security and privacy are of utmost importance and we need to verify the identities of system users before granting them access to sensitive patient-related data. To this end, several authentication protocols have been recently designed specifically for e-health systems. We survey several of these protocols and report on flaws and shortcomings we discovered. Moreover, we propose an authentication protocol that enables a medical professional and the network of sensors used by a patient to authenticate each other and share a cryptographic key to be used for security in a communication session. The protocol also enables the dynamic assignment of patients to doctors in order to control access to patients’ data. We perform a security analysis of the protocol both formally, using the ProVerif protocol analysis tool, and informally, demonstrating its security features. We show that our protocol achieves mutual authentication, secret key establishment, forward secrecy, and anonymity. In terms of performance, the protocol is computationally lightweight, as it relies on symmetric key cryptography. This is demonstrated by comparing the computational cost of our protocol (in terms of execution time) with that of other similar protocols.