iZKP-AKA: A secure and improved ZKP-AKA protocol for sustainable healthcare

The use of IoT in healthcare has undoubtedly brought many significant adaptations and benefits that changed medical facilities. However, the possibility of unauthorized access to private medical data is a serious issue that requires appropriate attention to protect the user’s privacy. Recently, a proposed scheme by Gurjot et al. suggested an authentication mechanism to provide anonymity and other security characteristics. We did the security analysis and informally proved that their scheme is prone to various attacks, such as failure to offer perfect forward secrecy, ephemeral secret leakage, traceability, replay, stolen device attacks, and also face desynchronization issues. These issues make the proposed scheme unsuitable for the healthcare system. Therefore, there is an impelling need to design an authentication mechanism that can restrict the attacker from getting any sensitive information. Considering the above requirements, we present a novel Zero Knowledge Proof based Authenticated Key Agreement (ZKP-AKA) protocol. The security of our proposed authentication mechanism is examined using the informal (non-mathematical) and formal (Scyther tool) security verification to confirm that the proposed protocol offers the prominent security features mentioned above. We also measure the performance to show that our proposed mechanism is suitable for IoT devices in the healthcare intelligent system by doing a comparative analysis with its competitors in terms of communication, computational, message exchange and energy consumption costs.