An Efficient and Practical Smart Card Based Anonymity Preserving User Authentication Scheme for TMIS using Elliptic...

Area of Science:

• * Computer Science
• * Information Security
• * Healthcare Technology

Background:

• * Existing remote user authentication and session key agreement schemes for Telecare Medical Information Systems often suffer from security weaknesses, limiting their practical application.
• * High computational and maintenance overhead on single medical servers due to unrestricted global patient access can lead to service failures.
• * Secure and efficient data exchange between patients and medical servers is critical for modern healthcare systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• * To design a secure medical system architecture and a standard mutual authentication scheme for a single medical server.
• * To ensure secure exchange of medical data between patients and doctors via a central medical server over insecure networks.
• * To validate the proposed scheme's security, efficiency, and resilience against various cyberattacks.

Main Methods:

• * Design of a novel medical system architecture and a mutual authentication scheme.
• * Security analysis exploring resilience to active and passive attacks.
• * Formal validation using Automated Validation of Internet Security Schemes and Applications (AVISSA) software.
• * Performance comparison with existing schemes in terms of communication and computation costs.

Main Results:

• * The proposed scheme is formally validated and confirmed to be protected against active and passive attacks via AVISSA simulation.
• * Demonstrated lower communication costs compared to existing literature schemes.
• * Achieved computation costs nearly equal to existing schemes.
• * Efficient handling of login, mutual authentication, session key agreement, verification, password update, and recovery phases.

Conclusions:

• * The developed scheme provides a secure and efficient solution for remote user authentication and session key agreement in Telecare Medical Information Systems.
• * The system effectively addresses security weaknesses and overhead issues associated with previous approaches.
• * The proposed scheme offers a practical and robust method for secure medical data exchange in a global healthcare context.