A lightweight three-factor anonymous authentication scheme with privacy protection for personalized healthcare applications

Abstract

Security and privacy issues in wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) have attracted lots of attention in both academia and industry due to the sensitiveness of medical system. In the past decade, extensive research has been carried out on these security issues, but no single study exists that addresses them adequately, especially for some important security properties, such as user anonymity and forward secrecy. As a step towards this direction, in this paper, the authors propose a lightweight three-factor anonymous authentication scheme with forward secrecy for personalized healthcare applications using only the lightweight cryptographic primitives. The proposed scheme adopts pseudonym identity technique to protect users' real identities and employs one-way hash chain technique to ensure forward secrecy. Analysis and comparison results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can not only reduce execution time by 34% as compared with the most effective related schemes, but also achieve more security and functional features.