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

On Security Analysis of Recent Password Authentication and Key Agreement Schemes Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Secure and efficient mutual authentication and key agreement schemes form the basis for any robust network communication system. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has emerged as one of the most successful Public Key Cryptosystem that efficiently meets all the security challenges. Comparison of ECC with other Public Key Cryptosystems (RSA, Rabin, ElGamal) shows that it provides equal level of security for a far smaller bit size, thereby substantially reducing the processing overhead. This makes it suitable for constrained environments like wireless networks and mobile devices as well as for security sensitive applications like electronic banking, financial transactions and smart grids. With the successful implementation of ECC in security applications (e-passports, e-IDs, embedded systems), it is getting widely commercialized. ECC is simple and faster and is therefore emerging as an attractive alternative for providing security in lightweight device, which contributes to its popularity in the present scenario. In this paper, we have analyzed some of the recent password based authentication and key agreement schemes using ECC for various environments. Furthermore, we have carried out security, functionality and performance comparisons of these schemes and found that they are unable to satisfy their claimed security goals

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

Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios