A Lightweight Remote User Authentication Protocol for Smart e-Health Networking Environment

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is one among the most recent and rapidly growing technologies in the field of modern wireless communications. Nowadays, IoT is considered to be the key enabling technology in the electronic health (e-Health) management systems. Key management and authentication play a significant role to meet the necessary requirements for secure communications in e-Health systems. However, the resource constraints in IoT smart environments raise real challenges achieving this goal. In this work, we propose a lightweight remote user authentication protocol for the smart e-Health environment. The proposed protocol is based on certificateless public key cryptography to avoid the use of certificate management and hence eliminate various problems that string along with the certificates. In this protocol, the resource constrained sensor nodes are only involved in the lightweight symmetric key cryptographic algorithms. The analysis results show that the proposed protocol enables an enhanced security level with the ability to fight against node impersonation attack and replay attack along with a sufficient computational cost. Moreover, the security analysis results by BAN-Logic and AVISPA tool support the security attributes of the proposed protocol.