An Efficient ID-Based Tripartite key Management Scheme for E-Health Systems

With the rapid advancement of Mobile Internet (MI) and wireless networks, mobile devices have become very essential tools for people's daily tasks as they can provide a wide range of services including video conference calls, online transactions, E-Health Records (EHR), E-Medical Records (EMR), etc. For example, EMR makes patients' medical information available instantly to authorized physicians and other healthcare professionals (HPs) in order to make decisions. However, there are still significant security threats regarding MI such as stealing patient's records or sensitive data, gaining illegitimate access, etc. Tripartite key agreement protocols are considered as a central component in today's mobile security requirements as they can allow three entities to authenticate each other and to agree on a common session key. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient identity-based tripartite key agreement protocol that allows one patient and two HPs to mutually authenticate each other and to establish a secure session key over an insecure open network. For each protocol run, the proposed protocol generates a new session key between the entities after being authenticated. This session key can be used to assure secure End-to-End communication between these entities. The informal security of the proposed protocol is analyzed and the analysis shows that the scheme can resist a variety of well-known attacks. Moreover, the protocol is compared with other protocols, and it shows better performance in terms of required computational and energy usage.