Lightweight authentication protocol for e-health clouds in IoT-based applications through 5G technology

Modern information technology has been utilized progressively to store and distribute a large amount of healthcare data to reduce costs and improve medical facilities. In this context, the emergence of e-Health clouds offers novel opportunities, like easy and remote accessibility of medical data. However, this achievement produces plenty of new risks and challenges like how to provide integrity, security, and confidentiality to the highly susceptible e-Health data. Among these challenges, authentication is a major issue that ensures that the susceptible medical data in clouds is not available to illegal participants. The smart card, password and biometrics are three factors of authentication which fulfill the requirement of giving high security. Numerous three-factor ECC-based authentication protocols on e-Health clouds have been presented so far. However, most of the protocols have serious security flaws and produce high computation and communication overheads. Therefore, we introduce a novel protocol for the e-Health cloud, which thwarts some major attacks, such as user anonymity, offline password guessing, impersonation, and stolen smart card attacks. Moreover, we evaluate our protocol through formal security analysis using the Random Oracle Model (ROM). The analysis shows that our proposed protocol is more efficient than many existing protocols in terms of computation and communication costs. Thus, our proposed protocol is proved to be more efficient, robust and secure

Towards a Provably Secure Authentication Protocol for Fog-Driven IoT-Based Systems

The emergence of fog-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems have played a significant role in enhancing the applicability of the IoT paradigm. In such systems, fog-nodes are proficient enough to retain, process and transmit the data coming from IoT devices. Nevertheless, as an extension of cloud computing, inheriting the security and privacy concerns of cloud computing is also inevitable in fog-based IoT systems. To deal with such challenges, a diverse range of security solutions are reported in the literature. However, most of them have several limitations (i.e., vulnerability to known security attacks and high computation overhead) that curtail their practical implementation applicability. Keeping these limitations in mind, this paper propose a privacy-preserving hash-based authenticated key agreement protocol using XOR and concatenation operations for fog-driven IoT systems. Using healthcare as a case study, the security of the novel protocol is evaluated by using informal and formal security analysis. In order to obtain the experimental results, the key cryptographic operations used at the user, fog node and cloud server-side are implemented on a mobile device, Arduino and cloud server, respectively. Findings from the performance evaluation results show that the proposed protocol has the least computation cost compared to several related competing protocols

A new One Health Framework in Qatar for future emerging and re-emerging zoonotic diseases preparedness and response

One Health is increasingly recognized as an optimal approach to address the global risk of health threats originating at the human, animal, and ecosystem interface, and their impact. Qatar has successfully practiced One Health approach for investigation and surveillance of zoonotic diseases such as MERS-CoV, and other health threats. However, the current gaps at institution and policy level hinder the sustainment of One Health. In this paper, we have assessed the potential for implementation of One Health Framework to reinforce and sustain One Health capacities in Qatar for 2022–2027. To implement One Health Framework in the country, Qatar Joint External Evaluation (JEE) report, lessons learnt during One Health experiences on zoonotic, vector-borne, and food borne diseases were used to present an outline for multisectoral coordination. In addition, technical capacities of One Health and factors that are required to operationalize it in the country were also assessed in series of meetings and workshops held at Ministry of Public Health on March 2022. Present health care infrastructure and resources were found to be conducive for effective management and response to shared health threats as evident during MERS-CoV, despite being more event based. Regardless, the need for more sustainable capacity development was unanimously emphasized. The consensus between all relevant stakeholders and partners was that there is a need for better communication channels, policies and protocols for data sharing, and the need to invest more resources for better sustainability. The proposed framework is expected to strengthen and facilitate multilateral coordination, enhanced laboratory capacity and network, improve active surveillance and response, risk communication, community engagement, maximize applied research, and build One Health technical work force. This would enable advancement and sustainment of One Health activities to prevent and control health threats shared between humans-animals-ecosystem interface