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Sensors

A Kyber-Based Lightweight Cloud-Assisted Authentication Scheme for Medical IoT

Yan He, Zhenyu Wang, Liuming Lin, Jing Sun, Shuanggen Liu

Published Mar 24, 2026• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Medical Internet of Things (MIoT) has promoted smart healthcare through the deep integration of wearable devices, wireless communication, and cloud services. However, this framework faces security risks, as attackers may exploit public channels to impersonate legitimate devices or services and steal sensitive data. Therefore, establishing authentication between wearable devices and servers prior to data transmission is crucial. Existing schemes suffer from two critical drawbacks: vulnerability to quantum attacks and excessively high communication overhead, highlighting the need for improved solutions. The authors of this paper present a multi-factor identity authentication protocol to achieve post-quantum security and privacy protection. The scheme integrates lattice-based Kyber key encapsulation and a fuzzy commitment mechanism to secure biological templates and enable post-quantum key agreement. Additionally, hash functions and lightweight error correction codes are employed to reduce terminal communication overhead. The security of the scheme is rigorously proved in the Real-or-Random model, and the analysis confirms that the scheme satisfies common security requirements for wireless networks. The proposed scheme is also compared with existing schemes, and the results demonstrate that it achieves a balance between security and overhead.

DOI
10.3390/s26072021

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The Medical Internet of Things (MIoT) has promoted smart healthcare through the deep integration of wearable devices, wireless communication, and cloud services. However, this framework faces security risks, as attackers may exploit public channels to impersonate legitimate devices or services and steal sensitive data. Therefore, establishing authentication between wearable devices and servers prior to data transmission is crucial. Existing schemes suffer from two critical drawbacks: vulnerability to quantum attacks and excessively high communication overhead, highlighting the need for improved solutions. The authors of this paper present a multi-factor identity authentication protocol to achieve post-quantum security and privacy protection. The scheme integrates lattice-based Kyber key encapsulation and a fuzzy commitment mechanism to secure biological templates and enable post-quantum key agreement. Additionally, hash functions and lightweight error correction codes are employed to reduce terminal communication overhead. The security of the scheme is rigorously proved in the Real-or-Random model, and the analysis confirms that the scheme satisfies common security requirements for wireless networks. The proposed scheme is also compared with existing schemes, and the results demonstrate that it achieves a balance between security and overhead.
The Medical Internet of Things (MIoT) plays a pivotal role in modern healthcare by integrating wireless communication and cloud computing to enhance medical practices. However, this framework presents security vulnerabilities, such as the risk of eavesdroppers exploiting public channels to intercept sensitive patient data or impersonate legitimate devices and services. Consequently, authentication between wearable devices and servers is essential before transmitting confidential information through open channels. While several authentication techniques offer protection against quantum attacks, they often incur high communication and computation costs, underscoring the need for further advancement. This paper introduces a multifactor authentication protocol designed to strengthen the integrity of cloud-assisted MIoT systems by incorporating post-quantum security. The proposed protocol utilizes a post-quantum fuzzy commitment (PQFC) scheme to enhance security and is rigorously analyzed under the random oracle model and ProVerif tool. Its functionality and security are thoroughly assessed, demonstrating adherence to key requirements such as memoryless operation, user anonymity, mutual authentication, and resistance to various threats, including biometric tampering, stolen-verifier attacks, and insider attacks. Additionally, a comprehensive comparison with existing schemes highlights a balanced trade-off between security and efficiency.
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.
In emerging environments such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), secure authentication and key negotiation play a crucial role in protecting data transmitted over public networks. However, many existing authentication protocols are still designed based on classical public-key cryptography primitives, and quantum computing may threaten their security. To address this challenge, we propose a post-quantum authentication and key agreement protocol that uses the lattice-based Kyber key encapsulation mechanism (KEM). Our proposed protocol integrates cryptographic authentication, smart card protection, and post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms, enabling mutual authentication between users and servers and securely establishing session keys. The security of the protocol is formally analyzed in the Real-or-Random (ROR) model under the random oracle assumption and the IND-CCA security of the underlying KEM scheme. Furthermore, through informal security analysis, we have further demonstrated that the protocol possesses important security properties, including anonymity, untraceability, perfect forward confidentiality, and resistance to known attacks. In addition, the computational cost and communication overhead of the proposed scheme are evaluated and compared with several representative authentication protocols. The results show that the proposed protocol can provide strong security while maintaining low computational cost and communication overhead.
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.
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.
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.