Comments on “A privacy preserving three-factor authentication protocol for e-health clouds”

Abstract

The security provisioning of increasing healthcare data is of critical importance. The e-health clouds can be seen as a move towards an efficient management of such a big volume of healthcare data. Many schemes have been presented to bring more security and privacy along with efficiency, in the handling of data for booming e-health industry. Recently, in this connection, Jiang et al. (J Supercomput 1---24 doi:10.1007/s11227-015-1610-x, 2016) presented a three-factor authentication protocol for e-health clouds. In this letter, we identify a serious flaw in the mutual authentication phase of the scheme, since an adversary may launch a denial-of-service attack (DoS) against the service providing server. Finally, we suggest a modification in the scheme to overcome the DoS attack.