A Blockchain-Assisted Privacy-Aware Authentication Scheme for Internet of Medical Things

Abstract

Benefiting from the progress of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, medical devices, wearables, sensors, and users can be connected with each other to form an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) ecosystem. IoMT improves efficiency, increases accuracy, and reduces the costs of the traditional healthcare system. However, since IoMT involves different entities and heterogeneous networks and carries a large amount of private information, it is a challenging task to ensure data security and protect privacy in the IoMT ecosystem. In this article, we focus on the issue of privacy-aware authentication between entities. We first propose a blockchain-assisted authentication framework for IoMT applications in the fog computing paradigm. Furthermore, we present two privacy-preserving authentication protocols based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and physically unclonable functions (PUFs), respectively, in terms of the capacity of involved entities. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that compared with several previous protocols, the proposed protocols have competitive computation and communication costs while achieving expected security requirements.