Lightweight Collaborative Authentication With Key Protection for Smart Electronic Health Record System

Abstract

When wireless body area network (WBAN) is playing an increasing role in modern medical systems, smart electronic health record (SEHR) system is heralded primarily as an economical and efficient way to optimize personal information or electronic health records (EHR) flowing through the inter-connected hierarchical network. Large scale, diversity and high sensitivity on EHR data collected from the personal intelligent medical sensors intrigue strong security and privacy preservation. As an authentication protocol can effectively identify the legality of the access entities, many authentication approaches for SEHR system have been proposed. However, few of them are suitable for such situation where an authentication message need to be generated by two parties, for example, doctors need to gain authenticaion from patients when accessing to EHRs. A limitation of using secret sharing scheme is the requirement of a trusted third party to recover the original private key. Therefore, we focus on the specific case of two participants (i.e., no trusted majority) and present a collaborative authentication protocol for SEHR system. Our protocol is provable secure under the hard problem assumptions and meets all the security requirements, especially private key protection. Furthermore, contract to an existing secure two-party authentication protocol that relies on heavy homomorphic encryptions and zero-knowledge proofs, our proposed protocol is tremendously faster than the previous ones shown by the performance analysis.