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

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

THRIVE: Threshold Homomorphic encryption based secure and privacy preserving bIometric VErification system

In this paper, we propose a new biometric verification and template protection system which we call the THRIVE system. The system includes novel enrollment and authentication protocols based on threshold homomorphic cryptosystem where the private key is shared between a user and the verifier. In the THRIVE system, only encrypted binary biometric templates are stored in the database and verification is performed via homomorphically randomized templates, thus, original templates are never revealed during the authentication stage. The THRIVE system is designed for the malicious model where the cheating party may arbitrarily deviate from the protocol specification. Since threshold homomorphic encryption scheme is used, a malicious database owner cannot perform decryption on encrypted templates of the users in the database. Therefore, security of the THRIVE system is enhanced using a two-factor authentication scheme involving the user's private key and the biometric data. We prove security and privacy preservation capability of the proposed system in the simulation-based model with no assumption. The proposed system is suitable for applications where the user does not want to reveal her biometrics to the verifier in plain form but she needs to proof her physical presence by using biometrics. The system can be used with any biometric modality and biometric feature extraction scheme whose output templates can be binarized. The overall connection time for the proposed THRIVE system is estimated to be 336 ms on average for 256-bit biohash vectors on a desktop PC running with quad-core 3.2 GHz CPUs at 10 Mbit/s up/down link connection speed. Consequently, the proposed system can be efficiently used in real life applications

A lightweight privacy preserving authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP-based VoIP

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an essential part of most Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) architecture. Although SIP provides attractive features, it is exposed to various security threats, and so an efficient and secure authentication scheme is sought to enhance the security of SIP. Several attempts have been made to address the tradeoff problem between security and efficiency, but designing a successful authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP is still a challenging task from the viewpoint of both performance and security, because performance and security as two critical factors affecting SIP applications always seem contradictory. In this study, we employ biometrics to design a lightweight privacy preserving authentication protocol for SIP based on symmetric encryption, achieving a delicate balance between performance and security. In addition, the proposed authentication protocol can fully protect the privacy of biometric characteristics and data identity, which has not been considered in previous work. The completeness of the proposed protocol is demonstrated by Gong, Needham, and Yahalom (GNY) logic. Performance analysis shows that our proposed protocol increases efficiency significantly in comparison with other related protocols

Bio-AKA: An efficient fingerprint based two factor user authentication and key agreement scheme

The fingerprint has long been used as one of the most important biological features in the field of biometrics. It is person-specific and remain identical though out one’s lifetime. Physically uncloneable functions (PUFs) have been used in authentication protocols due to the unique physical feature of it. In this paper, we take full advantage of the inherent security features of user’s fingerprint biometrics and PUFs to design a new user authentication and key agreement scheme, namely Bio-AKA, which meets the desired security characteristics. To protect the privacy and strengthen the security of biometric data and to improve the robustness of the proposed scheme, the fuzzy extractor is employed. The scheme proposed in the paper can protect user’s anonymity without the use of password and allow mutual authentication with key agreement. The experimental results show superior robustness and the simplicity of our proposed scheme has been validated via our performance and security analysis. The scheme can be an ideal candidate for real life applications that requires remote user authentication