A Group Authentication Scheme for IoT 5G Network Enabled e-Healthcare System

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes a network, which consists of real-life things/physical objects that can communicate with the virtual world and can make intelligent decisions. The rapid development of IoT has led to new opportunities in various real-time use case scenarios like smart homes, healthcare systems, transportation systems, education systems, agriculture systems, etc. With the growth in different technologies used for e-healthcare system, the numbers of security challenges are increasing day by day. It is due to the fact that it introduces several methods/techniques for medical data collection and data analysis. Different medical information are collected from the patient’s body using medical sensors that are attached to the patient’s body. Since the collected data and information are very sensitive, therefore, the transmission of those information securely over the Internet has become a challenging task. However, fifth-generation (5G) cellular network, because of its flexibility and high speed, has become a preferred alternative for the transmission of those data compared to other cellular networks. In this paper, a group authentication scheme for the e-healthcare systems in fifth-generation cellular network is proposed. In the proposed scheme, registration of the medical sensors is done remotely. The authentication process is performed as an extension of the existing Authentication and Key Agreement protocol for 5G cellular network (5G-AKA). Lightweight cryptographic techniques like one-way hash function, XOR operation, and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) are used, which are suitable for resource-constrained IoT environment. The results obtained from the security and performance analysis of the proposed scheme show it to be secure and efficient.