A Lightweight Authentication Scheme for E-Health Applications in the Context of Internet of Things

Abstract

The strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing traditional perceptions of the current Internet towards a vision of smart objects interacting with each other. In this vision e-health applications are one of the most promising applications in IoT. However, security issues are the major obstacle for their deployment. Among these issues, authentication of the different interconnected entities and exchanged data confidentiality constitutes the main concerns for users that need to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight authentication scheme for an e-health application. This scheme allows both of sensors and the Base Station (BS) to authenticate each other in order to secure the collection of health-related data. Our scheme uses nonces and Keyed-Hash message authentication (HMAC) to check the integrity of authentication exchanges. In addition, it provides authentication with less energy consumption, and it terminates with a session key agreement between each sensor and the Base Station. To assess our scheme, we carry out a performance and security analysis. The obtained results show that our scheme saves energy. In addition, it is resistant against different types of attacks.