Privacy protection for telecare medicine information systems using a chaotic map-based three-factor authenticated key agreement scheme

Telecare Medicine Information Systems (TMIS) provides flexible and convenient e-health care. However the medical records transmitted in TMIS are exposed to unsecured public networks, so TMIS are more vulnerable to various types of security threats and attacks. To provide privacy protection for TMIS, a secure and efficient authenticated key agreement scheme is urgently needed to protect the sensitive medical data. Recently, Mishra et al. proposed a biometrics-based authenticated key agreement scheme for TMIS by using hash function and nonce, they claimed that their scheme could eliminate the security weaknesses of Yan et al.’s scheme and provide dynamic identity protection and user anonymity. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that Mishra et al.’s scheme suffers from replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks and fails to provide perfect forward secrecy. To overcome the weaknesses of Mishra et al.’s scheme, we then propose a three-factor authenticated key agreement scheme to enable the patient enjoy the remote healthcare services via TMIS with privacy protection. The chaotic map-based cryptography is employed in the proposed scheme to achieve a delicate balance of security and performance. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme resists various attacks and provides several attractive security properties. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme increases efficiency in comparison with other related schemes

Secure Chaotic Maps-based Group Key Agreement Scheme with Privacy Preserving

Abstract Nowadays chaos theory related to cryptography has been addressed widely, so there is an intuitive connection between group key agreement and chaotic maps. Such a connector may lead to a novel way to construct authenticated and efficient group key agreement protocols. Many chaotic maps based two-party/three-party password authenticated key agreement (2PAKA/3PAKA) schemes have been proposed. However, to the best of our knowledge, no chaotic maps based group (N-party) key agreement protocol without using a timestamp and password has been proposed yet. In this paper, we propose the first chaotic maps-based group authentication key agreement protocol. The proposed protocol is based on chaotic maps to create a kind of signcryption method to transmit authenticated information and make the calculated consumption and communicating round restrict to an acceptable bound. At the same time our proposed protocol can achieve members' revocation or join easily, which not only refrains from consuming modular exponential computing and scalar multiplication on an elliptic curve, but is also robust to resist various attacks and achieves perfect forward secrecy with privacy preserving

Privacy protection for e-health systems by means of dynamic authentication and three-factor key agreement

During the past decade, the electronic healthcare (e-health) system has been evolved into a more patient-oriented service with smaller and smarter wireless devices. However, these convenient smart devices have limited computing capacity and memory size, which makes it harder to protect the user’s massive private data in the e-health system. Although some works have established a secure session key between the user and the medical server, the weaknesses still exist in preserving the anonymity with low energy consumption. Moreover, the misuse of biometric information in key agreement process may lead to privacy disclosure, which is irreparable. In this study, we design a dynamic privacy protection mechanism offering the biometric authentication at the server side whereas the exact value of the biometric template remains unknown to the server. And the user anonymity can be fully preserved during the authentication and key negotiation process because the messages transmitted with the proposed scheme are untraceable. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is proved to be semantic secure under the Real-or-Random Model. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme suits the e-health environment at the aspect of security and resource occupation

Authentication Protocols for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

In this paper, a comprehensive survey of authentication protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) is presented. Specifically more than forty authentication protocols developed for or applied in the context of the IoT are selected and examined in detail. These protocols are categorized based on the target environment: (1) Machine to Machine Communications (M2M), (2) Internet of Vehicles (IoV), (3) Internet of Energy (IoE), and (4) Internet of Sensors (IoS). Threat models, countermeasures, and formal security verification techniques used in authentication protocols for the IoT are presented. In addition a taxonomy and comparison of authentication protocols that are developed for the IoT in terms of network model, specific security goals, main processes, computation complexity, and communication overhead are provided. Based on the current survey, open issues are identified and future research directions are proposed

Securing fog computing with a decentralised user authentication approach based on blockchain

The use of low-cost sensors in IoT over high-cost devices has been considered less expensive. However, these low-cost sensors have their own limitations such as the accuracy, quality, and reliability of the data collected. Fog computing offers solutions to those limitations; nevertheless, owning to its intrinsic distributed architecture, it faces challenges in the form of security of fog devices, secure authentication and privacy. Blockchain technology has been utilised to offer solutions for the authentication and security challenges in fog systems. This paper proposes an authentication system that utilises the characteristics and advantages of blockchain and smart contracts to authenticate users securely. The implemented system uses the email address, username, Ethereum address, password and data from a biometric reader to register and authenticate users. Experiments showed that the proposed method is secure and achieved performance improvement when compared to existing methods. The comparison of results with state-of-the-art showed that the proposed authentication system consumed up to 30% fewer resources in transaction and execution cost; however, there was an increase of up to 30% in miner fees

Cryptography and Its Applications in Information Security

Nowadays, mankind is living in a cyber world. Modern technologies involve fast communication links between potentially billions of devices through complex networks (satellite, mobile phone, Internet, Internet of Things (IoT), etc.). The main concern posed by these entangled complex networks is their protection against passive and active attacks that could compromise public security (sabotage, espionage, cyber-terrorism) and privacy. This Special Issue “Cryptography and Its Applications in Information Security” addresses the range of problems related to the security of information in networks and multimedia communications and to bring together researchers, practitioners, and industrials interested by such questions. It consists of eight peer-reviewed papers, however easily understandable, that cover a range of subjects and applications related security of information