FogTrust: A Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Fog–IoT-Based E-Healthcare Environments

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is nowadays an important component of the E-healthcare systems, enabling real-time patient status tracking in addition to highly effective medical services. Nonetheless, this integration of IoT technologies represent important security and performance challenges. We develop FogTrust, an optimized authentication and cryptographic key agreement protocol for fog–based E-Healthcare environments, founded on Elliptic Curve algorithms, biometric validation and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). Our scheme ensures users, fog nodes and IoT devices anonymity and untraceability while withstanding several security attacks. Additionally, FogTrust provides a fine-grained access control phase where only authorized users are allowed to access confidential medical data. Additionally, we employ EdDSA to enhance signature efficiency and performance compared to traditional ECC-based signature schemes. FogTrust's formal security analysis is realized through the AVISPA Tool and the Scyther Tool that both demonstrate its robustness against various attacks. Along with its strong security features, FogTrust achieves high performance than alternative solutions, making it applicable in IoT devices known for there limited resources feature.