Efficient Mutual Authentication Scheme for IoT-based Healthcare System

IoT-based healthcare systems are introduced to provide real-time monitoring to improve patient health by providing an instant and swift diagnosis. The IoT devices are resource-constrained with less computing power and storage. Due to that, patients need to outsource their sensitive health data to the cloud. This data can be further used by the doctor or research organization over the public network on demand. The data exchanged over untrusted users made the data prone to leakage and manipulation. We proposed a mutual authentication scheme based on Elliptic curve cryptography(ECC), which is used to verify the end-users authenticity and provides the authorization for initializing the data-sharing process. The existing authentication schemes have high computation/communication overhead making the system inefficient for resource-constrained devices. These schemes are also prone to replay, impersonation, and man-in-middle attacks. We used the AVISPA simulation tool that makes the proposed scheme practically verified “safe”, and the informal security proves that the proposed scheme is secure against replay, man-in-the-middle, and impersonation attacks. The proposed scheme is implemented and compared with existing authentication schemes based on communication and computation overhead. The results prove that the proposed authentication scheme is more efficient and suitable for resource-constrained devices in the healthcare system.