A resilient and efficient authentication and key agreement protocol for medical IoT: the PSU-MAKA framework

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is gaining attention for its ability to enhance patient monitoring and decrease medical costs, driving advancements in personalized medicine. However, IoMT suffers from the security issue of data breaches resulting from unauthorized access, this issue hinders IoMT’s broader adoption. The introducing of mutual authentication and key agreement (MAKA) to robustly verify the identities of communicating entities, thus ensuring that access to information is limited to permitted users and blocking unauthorized access. But, to our knowledge, current MAKA schemes expose limitations such as performance complexity, potential security vulnerabilities. This study presents a provably secure user MAKA protocol (PSU-MAKA) for IoMT. The proposed PSU-MAKA allows users to complete the registration process without the need for a secure channel, while also supporting key agreement and password update. Then, the security analysis in this study illustrates the PSU-MAKA’s robustness against the potential security vulnerabilities. Lastly, this study gives the evidence that the PSU-MAKA offers superior performance in relation to other competing solutions regarding communication, computational, and storage overhead.