A Secure and Efficient Uniqueness-and-Anonymity-Preserving Remote User Authentication Scheme for Connected Health Care

Abstract

Connected health care has several applications including telecare medicine information system, personally controlled health records system, and patient monitoring. In such applications, user authentication can ensure the legality of patients. In user authentication for such applications, only the legal user/patient himself/herself is allowed to access the remote server, and no one can trace him/her according to transmitted data. Chang et al. proposed a uniqueness-and-anonymity-preserving remote user authentication scheme for connected health care (Chang et al., J Med Syst 37:9902, 2013). Their scheme uses the user's personal biometrics along with his/her password with the help of the smart card. The user's biometrics is verified using BioHashing. Their scheme is efficient due to usage of one-way hash function and exclusive-or (XOR) operations. In this paper, we show that though their scheme is very efficient, their scheme has several security weaknesses such as (1) it has design flaws in login and authentication phases, (2) it has design flaws in password change phase, (3) it fails to protect privileged insider attack, (4) it fails to protect the man-in-the middle attack, and (5) it fails to provide proper authentication. In order to remedy these security weaknesses in Chang et al.'s scheme, we propose an improvement of their scheme while retaining the original merit of their scheme. We show that our scheme is efficient as compared to Chang et al.'s scheme. Through the security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against possible attacks. Further, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool to ensure that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks. In addition, after successful authentication between the user and the server, they establish a secret session key shared between them for future secure communication.