A mutual lightweight authentication scheme for fog-cloud-based e-health services

Abstract

The new version Internet network, now referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates interconnectivity among various objects and devices. The introduction of both Cloud and Fog computing paradigms, device device-to-device (D2D) communication standards, as well as enabling privacy and security approaches, have all contributed to the practical realization of E-health services in IoT-enabled networks. Gen-erally, Fog layer nodes are often located in public places, where they are easily accessible and thus vulnerable to various securi-ty threats. Should this occur, the current and previously gener-ated security keys, as well as device identities, must be kept secret thus ensuring anonymity, unlinkability, forward secrecy, e.t.c. Thus in this paper, we introduce an E-Health authenti-cation and security architecture for the D2D-Aided fog compu-ting model, that facilitates verification of key components such as patients and peripheral devices without involving a central-ized cloud server. This is followed by a proposal for a light-weight anonymous authentication protocol (LAAP) to carry out authentication of the various parties in an E-health system. The proposed protocol is evaluated for various scenarios in D2D-Aided fog computing. Lightweight crypto- graphic primi-tives such as exclusive-or operations and one-way hash func-tion are relied upon to facilitate the inclusion of resource-constrained end-user devices mostly incorporated in body area networks (BANs). Ultimately we carry out an evaluation of the proposed proposal in terms of its efficacy, and security. The proposed protocol is generally found to be practically feasible for implementation in E-health service infrastructures.