An improved authentication and key agreement protocol for smart healthcare system in the context of internet of things using elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is heterogeneous in nature and has diverse application areas. Smart healthcare (s-health) is one of the most significant applications of IoT that handles sensitive health-related data, which can be manipulated to cause fatal safety consequences. Hence, security and privacy must be considered as the most important factors during the design of wearable s-health. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a secure communication channel between wearable sensors or devices and the remote server of the IoT network. In this work, we propose a protocol for authentication and key agreement using ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) to protect the health-related data in s-health. In this work, trusted sensors take the responsibility of completing the complex cryptographic operations on behalf of resource-constraint sensors. The smartphones accelerometers data and the data received from sensors installed on the body are used to do the trust verification by finding data correlations. Moreover, through security and performance analysis we have shown that the proposed protocol is secure against all relevant cryptographic attacks and is lightweight due to the use of ECC.