Robust Biometric-based Anonymous User Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Telecare Medicine Information Systems

Abstract

At present, numerous hospitals and medical institutes have implemented Telecare Medicine Information Systems (TMIS) with authentication protocols to enable secure, efficient electronic transactions for e-medicine. Numerous studies have investigated the use of authentication protocols to construct efficient, robust health care services, and recently, Liu et al. presented an authenticated key agreement mechanism for TMIS. They argued that their mechanism can prevent various types of attacks and preserve a secure environment. However, we discovered that Liu et al.`s mechanism presents some vulnerabilities. First, their mechanism uses an improper identification process for user biometrics; second, the mechanism is not guaranteed to protect against server spoofing attacks; third, there is no session key verification process in the authentication process. As such, we describe how the above-mentioned attacks operate and suggest an upgraded security mechanism for TMIS. We analyze the security and performance of our method to show that it improves security relative to comparable schemes and also operates in an efficient manner.