Abstract
The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the electronic health (e-health) management systems brings with it many challenges, including secure communications through insecure radio channels, authentication and key agreement schemes between the entities involved, access control protocols and also schemes for transferring ownership of vital patient information. Besides, the resource-limited sensors in the IoT have real difficulties in achieving this goal. Motivated by these considerations, in this work we propose a new lightweight authentication and ownership transfer protocol for e-health systems in the context of IoT (LACO in short). The goal is to propose a secure and energy-efficient protocol that not only provides authentication and key agreement but also satisfies access control and preserves the privacy of doctors and patients. Moreover, this is the first time that the ownership transfer of users is considered. In the ownership transfer phase of the proposed scheme, the medical server can change the ownership of patient information. In addition, the LACO protocol overcomes the security flaws of recent authentication protocols that were proposed for e-health systems, but are unfortunately vulnerable to traceability, de-synchronization, denial of service (DoS), and insider attacks. To avoid past mistakes, we present formal (i.e., conducted on ProVerif language) and informal security analysis for the LACO protocol. All this ensures that our proposed scheme is secure against the most common attacks in IoT systems. Compared to the predecessor schemes, the LACO protocol is both more efficient and more secure to use in e-health systems.
•We present several serious security attacks against Zhang et al. scheme (called ZZTL). Our proposed attacks include user traceability, de-synchronization, DoS and insider attacks.•In order to increase the security level offered by ZZTL protocol, we fix all security faults found in this scheme.•We propose a new architecture involving three main entities. We also provide the access control mechanism during the authentication phase.•We also consider the situation where the current doctor of the patient wants to transfer her/his privileges to a new doctor (ownership transfer).•The security of the proposed scheme is examined from a formal (ProVerif language) and informal point of view.•The efficiency of our proposal is higher than the predecessor schemes. Therefore our scheme can be used for resource-constrained sensors in IoT systems.