An Improved Lightweight User Authentication Scheme for the Internet of Medical Things

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity
• Health Informatics
• Internet of Things (IoT)

Background:

• The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) relies on sensors for patient monitoring, necessitating robust security.
• Existing IoMT authentication schemes are vulnerable to offline password guessing and privileged insider attacks.
• These vulnerabilities risk exposure of sensitive patient data and personal information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an improved, lightweight user authentication scheme for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT).
• To enhance security against specific, identified attack vectors in healthcare IoT environments.
• To improve the performance of authentication protocols for low-specification medical IoT sensors.

Main Methods:

• Development of a novel lightweight user authentication scheme utilizing hash functions and XOR operations.
• Security validation using the ProVerif cryptographic protocol tool.
• Comparative analysis of the proposed scheme against existing protocols.

Main Results:

• The proposed IoMT authentication scheme effectively mitigates offline password guessing and privileged insider attacks.
• The scheme demonstrates enhanced security compared to previously described protocols.
• Performance analysis shows a 266.48% improvement over existing methods for low-spec sensors.

Conclusions:

• The improved IoMT authentication scheme provides a more secure and efficient solution for protecting patient data in connected healthcare.
• The use of hash functions and XOR operations is suitable for resource-constrained medical IoT devices.
• This research contributes to securing the IoMT ecosystem against critical cyber threats.