A reliable RFID mutual authentication scheme for healthcare environments

Radio frequency identification (RFID) applications have the potential to increase the reliability of healthcare environments. However, there are obvious security and privacy concerns with regard to storing personal and medical data in RFID tags, and the lack of secure authentication systems in healthcare environments remains as a challenge the further use of this technology, one that touches on issues of confidentiality, unforgeability, location privacy, and scalability. This study proposes a novel mutual authentication protocol that considers all of these issues and solves the tradeoff between location privacy and scalability in healthcare environments. A formal proof and analysis is demonstrated to prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, and that high reliability has and can be easily deployed and managed. This study also provides a scenario example that applied proposed protocol in the newborn care and management. The result shows that the proposed scheme solves the related tradeoff problem, and is capable of providing both location privacy and scalability. To apply the authentication scheme proposed in this work would be able to increase confidence in future implementations of RFID systems in healthcare environments.