Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Remote User Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Next-Generation IoT-Based Smart Healthcare

The advancement and innovations in wireless communication technologies including the Internet of Things have massively changed the paradigms of health-based services. In particular, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the trends of working from home have been promoted. Wireless body area network technology frameworks help sufferers in remotely obtaining scientific remedies from physicians through the Internet without paying a visit to the clinics. IoT sensor nodes are incorporated into the clinical device to allow health workers to consult the patients’ fitness conditions in real time. Insecure wireless communication channels make unauthorized access to fitness-related records and manipulation of IoT sensor nodes attached to the patient’s bodies possible, as a result of security flaws. As a result, IoT-enabled devices are threatened by a number of well-known attacks, including impersonation, replay, man-in-the-middle, and denial-of-service assaults. Modern authentication schemes do solve these issues, but they frequently involve challenging mathematical concepts that raise processing and transmission costs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, secure, and efficient symmetric key exchange algorithm and remote user authentication scheme. Our research proposal presents a successful privacy-protecting method for remote users and provides protection against known attacks. When compared to conventional options, this technique significantly reduces calculation costs by up to 37.68% and transmission costs by up to 32.55%.