RLKS-TMS: A Robust and Lightweight Key Agreement Scheme for Telemedicine System

Abstract

It is challenging in the e-healthcare system to monitor patients using wearables or embedded sensors that can gather real-time physiological data, analyze lab test results, conduct medical examinations, and recommend treatments because all the associated sensitive information transmission is through a hostile environment; it is always possible for an unauthorized person to access them. To improve the security of the telemedicine system in such a situation, it is imperative to develop a real-time data transmission system that can effectively handle the tasks carried out by devices in the telemedicine system. This allows administrators to assess the correctness of the various users' work and remotely monitor the real-time data gathered by the smart sensing devices. However, as stated, the real-time data is shared across a public channel - and is private and sensitive; an attacker accesses the sensitive information about the telemedicine system and makes it public to disturb user privacy and violate its security. A robust and lightweight key agreement scheme must be designed for the telemedicine system to create a secret session key between a chosen wearable or smart sensing device and the telemedicine server - a trustworthy entity installed in the telehealthcare environment. Otherwise, security for such sensitive information cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, this article presents the design of a robust and lightweight authentication protocol named RLKAS-TMS that can effectively alleviate the security and privacy concerns of sensitive medical information over a public network channel.