A Novel Lightweight Authentication Scheme for RFID-Based Healthcare Systems.

Peng Li,He Xu,Feng Zhu,Ruchuan Wang

doi:10.3390/s20174846

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been integrated into legacy healthcare systems for the purpose of improving healthcare processes. As one of the key technologies of IoT, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been applied to offer services like patient monitoring, drug administration, and medical asset tracking. However, people have concerns about the security and privacy of RFID-based healthcare systems, which require a proper solution. To solve the problem, recently in 2019, Fan et al. proposed a lightweight RFID authentication scheme in the IEEE Network. They claimed that their scheme can resist various attacks in RFID systems with low implementation cost, and thus is suitable for RFID-based healthcare systems. In this article, our contributions mainly consist of two parts. First, we analyze the security of Fan et al.’s scheme and find out its security vulnerabilities. Second, we propose a novel lightweight authentication scheme to overcome these security weaknesses. The security analysis shows that our scheme can satisfy the necessary security requirements. Besides, the performance evaluation demonstrates that our scheme is of low cost. Thus, our scheme is well-suited for practical RFID-based healthcare systems.

Highlights

The Internet of Things (IoT), as its name implies, means to connect a large number of objects to the Internet, such as smartphones, vehicles, sensors, and wearable devices [1]
Over the last several years, researchers have proposed a variety of authentication schemes, aiming to secure radio frequency identification (RFID)-based healthcare systems
In 2015, Srivastava et al [24] proposed a new authentication protocol to strengthen the security of telecare medicine information systems (TIMSs), which is based on a hash function and shared secrets

Summary

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT), as its name implies, means to connect a large number of objects to the Internet, such as smartphones, vehicles, sensors, and wearable devices [1]. With the nice feature of noncontact automatic identification, in recent years, RFID technology has been applied in healthcare systems for providing intelligent services such as patient monitoring, drug administration, and medical asset tracking [6]. Drugs are attached with tags so that medical errors [7] caused by inadequate patient monitoring can be reduced. Integrating with technology, hospitals track medical assets order mitigate theft loss, improve resource utilization, and save costs [6]. In either architecture, since the reader and tag use radio waves communication, the channel between them is unsafe. A straightforward straightforwardidea idea securing an RFID in practical systems, especially the large ones, tags conforming to the Electronics. We first show that their scheme has several security flaws and propose our improved scheme

Contributions

Organization

Related Works

Security Demands

Adversary Model

Notations

Initial Phase

Authentication Phase

Update Phase

Attack against Forward Secrecy

Impersonation Attack

The Proposed Scheme