SELAM: selective ECC-based lightweight authentication for the internet of medical things

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity
• Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
• Cryptography

Background:

• Resource-constrained medical devices in IoMT require robust security with minimal computational overhead.
• Existing authentication methods often struggle to balance strong security with efficiency for IoMT applications.
• The need for lightweight yet secure authentication is critical for protecting sensitive patient data.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce SELAM, a novel lightweight multifactor authentication framework for critical IoMT applications.
• To significantly reduce runtime computational and communication overhead compared to traditional ECC-based methods.
• To ensure strong security guarantees, including mutual authentication and resistance to impersonation and replay attacks.

Main Methods:

• Developed SELAM, a framework confining Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to registration and using lightweight primitives for online operations.
• Validated SELAM using the CICIoMT-2024 dataset through Python cryptographic simulations and ns-3 network emulation.
• Analyzed security using BAN logic and evaluated performance metrics including communication overhead, computation time, and authentication success ratio.

Main Results:

• SELAM reduced online communication by 20% (6,144 bits/device vs. 7,680 bits/device) and total authentication overhead by 80% (6.24 ms vs. 31.27 ms) compared to an ECC baseline.
• Online computation was drastically reduced from 23.59 ms to 0.10 ms per device.
• Maintained a high authentication success ratio (0.88-0.90) with zero false acceptance rates (FAR=0) and zero false rejection rates (FRR=0) for benign operations.

Conclusions:

• Confining ECC to the registration phase effectively preserves strong authentication while significantly improving performance for IoMT devices.
• SELAM offers a practical and efficient solution for secure authentication in resource-constrained IoMT environments.
• The framework demonstrates superior performance and security, making it suitable for critical medical applications.