Lightweight Mutual Authentication for Healthcare IoT

“Smart medical” applications refer to the fusion of technology and medicine that connects all linked sensor equipment with the patients, including those that measure physiological signals, such as blood pressure, pulse, and ECG. In addition, these physiological signal data are highly private and should be safely protected. It takes much longer to complete authentication processes in the traditional way, either based on public key infrastructure or attribute-based encryption, which is a burden for IoT devices. Hence, on the basis of attribute-based encryption, we propose lightweight authentication to shorten the time spent on authentication. Moreover, we use the patients’ data and timestamps as seeds to generate random numbers for authentication. The experiments show that the lightweight authentication using Xeon E3-1230 computer is about 4.45 times faster than complete authentication and 5.8 times faster than complete authentication when using Raspberry Pi. Our proposal significantly improves the disadvantages of IoT devices that lack computing power.