Anonymous Lightweight Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Fog-Assisted Healthcare IoT System

The impact of fog-assisted healthcare Internet of Things (H-IoT) system is immense. The smart H-IoT equipments can upload healthcare information to fog nodes with low latency and high mobility. To facilitate secure interactions among three parties, including smart H-IoT equipments, fog nodes, and a cloud server, over the public and insecure channels, a few authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols are proposed. However, existing works are constructed based on expensive cryptographic primitives (e.g., bilinear pairing), which lead to high computation costs. Besides, the anonymity of H-IoT users is failed to be provided. To tackle these issues, an anonymous and lightweight three-party AKA protocol (ALAKAP) is proposed, which leverages an efficient cryptographic primitive (i.e., Chebyshev chaotic map operation) to generate a shared session key among three parties and achieve security (anonymity and other six properties) and efficiency simultaneously. It then formally proves the security of ALAKAP under the broadly accepted Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic model and demonstrates how the proposed protocol satisfies the desired requirements in the fog-assisted H-IoT system. Finally, the performance of ALAKAP is validated by conducting the experiments on Amazon EC2 and Raspberry Pi. The results show that our work can achieve at least 44% higher improvement than the state-of-the-art works.

Automated summary

The impact of fog-assisted healthcare Internet of Things (H-IoT) system is significant. Existing authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols for secure interactions among smart H-IoT equipments, fog nodes, and a cloud server are based on expensive cryptographic primitives and fail to provide anonymity. To tackle these issues, a proposed anonymous and lightweight three-party AKA protocol (ALAKAP) leverages an efficient cryptographic primitive to achieve security and efficiency simultaneously. The protocol's security is formally proven and its performance is validated through experiments.