In an Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare system, medical IoT devices gather and transmit critical patient data. Ensuring the security and privacy of medical data is paramount. One of the most critical challenges in this regard is the authentication of participating entities. The literature proposes specific authentication approaches for healthcare systems based on integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems. However, the advent of quantum computers would fundamentally break all of these protocols. In this study, we conducted an analysis of a recently proposed authentication and access control scheme for e-health systems, which is based on lattice-based cryptography and was developed by Gupta et al. Our analysis revealed that the scheme is vulnerable to several types of attacks, including impersonation, de-synchronization, and smart card stolen attacks, which could compromise the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive medical data. To address these security challenges, we propose an alternative authentication and access control scheme that uses Saber, a finalist lattice-based key encapsulation algorithm from round three of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization. One of the biggest advantages of Saber is its simplicity and efficiency. Our proposed scheme is designed specifically for e-health systems and provides robust protection against the vulnerabilities identified in Gupta et al.’s scheme. We believe that our proposed scheme represents a significant improvement over existing approaches and could help to enhance the security and privacy of e-health systems. Upon completion of our improved protocol, we proceeded to implement it within the Vivado 2018.3 environment for Zynq UltraScale FPGAs. To gather insight into its performance, we conducted a performance comparison study with various related protocols.
In an Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare system, medical IoT devices gather and transmit critical patient data. Ensuring the security and privacy of medical data is paramount. One of the most critical challenges in this regard is the authentication of participating entities. The literature proposes specific authentication approaches for healthcare systems based on integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems. However, the advent of quantum computers would fundamentally break all of these protocols. In this study, we conducted an analysis of a recently proposed authentication and access control scheme for e-health systems, which is based on lattice-based cryptography and was developed by Gupta et al. Our analysis revealed that the scheme is vulnerable to several types of attacks, including impersonation, de-synchronization, and smart card stolen attacks, which could compromise the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive medical data. To address these security challenges, we propose an alternative authentication and access control scheme that uses Saber, a finalist lattice-based key encapsulation algorithm from round three of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization. One of the biggest advantages of Saber is its simplicity and efficiency. Our proposed scheme is designed specifically for e-health systems and provides robust protection against the vulnerabilities identified in Gupta et al.’s scheme. We believe that our proposed scheme represents a significant improvement over existing approaches and could help to enhance the security and privacy of e-health systems. Upon completion of our improved protocol, we proceeded to implement it within the Vivado 2018.3 environment for Zynq UltraScale FPGAs. To gather insight into its performance, we conducted a performance comparison study with various related protocols.
Abstract In internet of things (IOT) healthcare systems, sensitive patient information is transmitted over the network to medical professionals. Numerous lightweight authentication protocols have been proposed; however, most of them remain vulnerable to various cyberattacks, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on or manipulate transmitted data. We examine several recently proposed lightweight authentication schemes for healthcare systems. Our security analysis demonstrates that these schemes remain vulnerable to malicious gateway attacks, desynchronization attacks, and key screw attacks. .To address these issues and ensure post- quantum security in healthcare IoT, we propose a post-quantum key establishment protocol based on lattice- based cryptography (LWE). the proposed scheme prevents the gateway from accessing both the secret keys and their parameters, thereby eliminating the possibility of malicious gateway attacks. The proposed protocol ensures user anonymity, forward secrecy, and resistance to impersonation, key screw, and desynchronization attacks.. The proposed protocol ensures secure and efficient establishment of three-round key establishment among entities . Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme achieves lower computation and communication overhead compared to recent related works. The security of the protocol is thoroughly analyzed through informal reasoning, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and ProVerif, confirming its robustness and suitability for resource-constrained IoT-based healthcare environments.
The emergence and growth of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) have transformed the way healthcare services are delivered, but this growth comes with its own security challenges, especially with the emergence of quantum computing. This paper presents a lightweight, privacy-preserving authentication scheme for edge-based IoMT environments, integrating CRYSTALS-Kyber Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) to securely establish session keys between participating entities and resilience against quantum attacks, while CRYSTALS-Dilithium is utilized as the digital signature scheme to ensure message integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. These NIST-standardized post-quantum primitives collectively strengthen the system's resistance against quantum adversaries and enhance overall cryptographic robustness. The proposed system comprises two phases: Registration and Authentication. During registration, patients, wearable devices that utilize Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), and medical specialists register with a Trusted Authority via edge nodes. The authentication phase encompasses mutual authentication among patients, devices, medical specialists, edge nodes, and cloud servers, ensuring that only authorized entities access sensitive health information. In addition, the proposed scheme employs the formal security properties, such as authenticity and secrecy, are verified using the AVISPA tool under the Dolev-Yao model, with results confirming that all defined goals are achieved and no attacks are found. Performance evaluations indicate that the scheme is computationally efficient and suitable for resource-constrained IoMT devices. Furthermore, BAN logic is employed to formally verify the correctness of the authentication protocol, demonstrating that mutual authentication is securely established among the participating entities under well-defined trust assumptions. By integrating post-quantum cryptographic techniques, this authentication framework addresses emerging security challenges posed by quantum computing, aligning with the objectives of enhancing edge-based consumer electronics devices and Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems with post-quantum cryptosystems.
Over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has played a crucial role in designing e-health systems. An IoT-enabled e-health system allows different entities to examine a patient's health condition anywhere and anytime. However, the deployment of e-health systems in an IoT environment faces various security and privacy challenges. The authentication of participating entities, the confidentiality of information transferred through an insecure channel, and access control are essential issues to be resolved. To settle these challenges, we found many authentication protocols for e-health systems based on the discrete logarithm and integer factorization problems. However, quantum attacks expose all these protocols. In this article, we propose a lattice-based authentication and access control (LAAC) protocol for IoT-enabled e-health systems to mitigate the quantum attacks. We prove that LAAC is robust with the hardness assumption of the inhomogeneous small integer solution problem. Moreover, we provide provable security analysis of LAAC. Besides, performance evaluation shows it is reasonable to execute LAAC in an IoT device.
Rapid advancement in Internet of Things(IoT) changes the way people work and live deliberately. Medical IoT (MIoT) is a highly significant application in the world of IoT, allowing the user to communicate with smart medical devices with the help of a hospital gateway node. To establish a private communication channel, a three-party authenticated key agreement (AKA) technique using public-key cryptography is used. Currently, the AKA algorithms used in MIoT are based on classical cryptography such as ElGamal, RSA, ECC, etc. All of these techniques have become obsolete in the post-quantum environment as the Shor algorithm can solve these techniques on quantum computers. To overcome the problem stated above, a scheme called Lattice based Three party authenticated key agreement scheme in Medical IoT is proposed to accomplish security and efficiency in a post-quantum environment. Formal and informal security analysis is given to authenticate the protocol’s security. Also, the security analysis is conducted formally with the help of the Random Oracle Model (ROM) and ProVerif tool. The suggested scheme is compared to existing schemes in terms of security features, computing costs, and communication costs to evaluate the system’s performance. It validates that the suggested scheme exceeds the existing schemes.
With the digitization and networking of medical and health data, intelligent medical devices are widely used to monitor patient health status and provide personalized medical services. However, these devices involve a large amount of personal health data and must ensure data security. The data security and privacy protection in the new complex network environment has become one of the important challenges in the field of healthcare. This study aims to propose a post quantum attribute based authentication key agreement protocol applicable to intelligent healthcare, to address the security risks and risks of medical data communication under traditional cryptographic systems. This new protocol is based on attribute authentication encryption technology without certificates on the grid, which completes mutual authentication and establishes secure communication through attribute and access control policies, and can optimize the deployment of certificate system components in public key infrastructure. Meanwhile, this scheme belongs to the post quantum cryptography protocol and has the ability to resist quantum computing attacks. Based on comprehensive analysis, this scheme can achieve certain advantages in execution efficiency and security, and can provide a more reliable choice for secure communication in the field of intelligent healthcare.
The rapid adoption of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices enables real-time patient monitoring and remote diagnostics and has revolutionized healthcare delivery. Traditional cryptographic schemes like RSA and ECC, which rely on meaningful mathematical challenges, are under great threat from quantum computing, threatening sensitive medical data confidentiality and integrity. This paper proposes a quantum-resistant healthcare security framework based on lattice-based cryptographic primitives such as Learning With Errors (LWE), Ring-LWE (RLWE), and Short Integer Solution (SIS). To this end, we design a five-phase IoMT-friendly framework—Initialization, Registration, Authentication, Data Exchange, and Treatment—where each phase is backed up by lightweight cryptography primitives that can be easily implemented on the low-resource IoMT devices. Relative to the state-of-the-art lattice- and hash-based constructions, our framework involves 50-75% smaller ciphertext sizes, up to a 50% reduction of the communication overhead, and nearly 60% less in computational cost. Furthermore, the solution relies on zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption as well and attribute-based access control to guarantee strong security and privacy. Using the AVISPA tool, the framework is formally verified, showing its resistance against classical and quantum adversaries. Focusing on tangible healthcare threats, including data tampering and unlicensed access to patient diagnostics, this research paves the way for scalable, efficient, and quantum-resistant medical data protection. Our results pave the way for future investigations into secure post-quantum healthcare and IoT applications.