Authors: Xiaoying Jia, Min Luo, Huaqun Wang, Jian Shen, Debiao He

Title: A Blockchain-Assisted Privacy-Aware Authentication Scheme for Internet of Medical Things

Journal: IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Abstract: Benefiting from the progress of internet of things (IoT) technology, medical devices, wearables, sensors and users can be connected with each other to form an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) ecosystem. IoMT improves efficiency, increases accuracy and reduces costs of traditional healthcare system. However, since IoMT involves different entities and heterogenous networks and carries a large amount of private information, it is a challenging task to ensure data security and protect privacy in the IoMT ecosystem. In this article, we focus on the issue of privacy-aware authentication between entities. We first propose an blockchain-assisted authentication framework for IoMT applications in the fog computing paradigm. Furthermore, we present two privacy-preserving authentication protocols based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and physically unclonable functions (PUFs) respectively, in terms of capacity of involved entities. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that compared with several previous protocols, the proposed protocols have competitive computation and communication costs, while achieving expected security requirements.