Cryptanalysis and Enhancement of Anonymity Preserving Remote User Mutual Authentication and Session Key Agreement Scheme for E-Health Care Systems

The E-health care systems employ IT infrastructure for maximizing health care resources utilization as well as providing flexible opportunities to the remote patient. Therefore, transmission of medical data over any public networks is necessary in health care system. Note that patient authentication including secure data transmission in e-health care system is critical issue. Although several user authentication schemes for accessing remote services are available, their security analysis show that none of them are free from relevant security attacks. We reviewed Das et al.’s scheme and demonstrated their scheme lacks proper protection against several security attacks such as user anonymity, off-line password guessing attack, smart card theft attack, user impersonation attack, server impersonation attack, session key discloser attack. In order to overcome the mentioned security pitfalls, this paper proposes an anonymity preserving remote patient authentication scheme usable in E-health care systems. We then validated the security of the proposed scheme using BAN logic that ensures secure mutual authentication and session key agreement. We also presented the experimental results of the proposed scheme using AVISPA software and the results ensure that our scheme is secure under OFMC and CL-AtSe models. Moreover, resilience of relevant security attacks has been proved through both formal and informal security analysis. The performance analysis and comparison with other schemes are also made, and it has been found that the proposed scheme overcomes the security drawbacks of the Das et al.’s scheme and additionally achieves extra security requirements.