A blockchain-based medical IoT authentication scheme resistant to combined attacks

Abstract

The Medical Internet of Things (MIoT) has transformed the healthcare industry by facilitating telemedicine and real-time health monitoring. In MIoT, doctors can address patients’ issues at any time and in any scenario. However, MIoT faces common data security issues in IoT applications, and the unique nature of healthcare services demands higher privacy protection. Consequently, ensuring secure communication in MIoT is imperative. Traditional MIoT Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocols often use centralized methods, presenting a single point of failure. Moreover, these protocols can only resist single attacks and cannot cope with combined attacks that attackers might launch. These limitations make it difficult to meet the actual needs of MIoT. To address these issues, we propose an MIoT authentication protocol that resists combined attacks and solves single points of failure by integrating Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), blockchain technology, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) while introducing fog computing. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol ensures semantic security and satisfies the specified security requirements even under combined attacks. Performance analysis indicates that our protocol achieves more comprehensive security features under combined attacks and has lower consumption in several aspects.