Visual Sharing Protection Method for Medical Images

The telecare medical information system (TMIS) aims to establish telecare services and enable the public to access medical services or medical information at remote sites. Authentication and key agreement is essential to ensure data integrity, confidentiality, and availability for TMIS. Most recently, Chen et al. proposed an efficient and secure dynamic ID-based authentication scheme for TMIS, and claimed that their scheme achieves user anonymity. However, we observe that Chen et al.’s scheme achieves neither anonymity nor untraceability, and is subject to the identity guessing attack and tracking attack. In order to protect user privacy, we propose an enhanced authentication scheme which achieves user anonymity and untraceablity. It is a secure and efficient authentication scheme with user privacy preservation which is practical for TMIS.     

Robust Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Telecare Medical Information Systems

Patient can obtain sorts of health-care delivery services via Telecare Medical Information Systems (TMIS). Authentication, security, patient’s privacy protection and data confidentiality are important for patient or doctor accessing to Electronic Medical Records (EMR). In 2012, Chen et al. showed that Khan et al.’s dynamic ID-based authentication scheme has some weaknesses and proposed an improved scheme, and they claimed that their scheme is more suitable for TMIS. However, we show that Chen et al.’s scheme also has some weaknesses. In particular, Chen et al.’s scheme does not provide user’s privacy protection and perfect forward secrecy, is vulnerable to off-line password guessing attack and impersonation attack once user’s smart card is compromised. Further, we propose a secure anonymity authentication scheme to overcome their weaknesses even an adversary can know all information stored in smart card.     

A Wavelet Transform Based Feature Extraction and Classification of Cardiac Disorder

Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) is widely used for providing a convenient and efficient communicating platform between patients at home and physicians at medical centers or home health care (HHC) organizations. To ensure patient privacy, in 2013, Hao et al. proposed a chaotic map based authentication scheme with user anonymity for TMIS. Later, Lee showed that Hao et al.’s scheme is in no provision for providing fairness in session key establishment and gave an efficient user authentication and key agreement scheme using smart cards, in which only few hashing and Chebyshev chaotic map operations are required. In addition, Jiang et al. discussed that Hao et al.’s scheme can not resist stolen smart card attack and they further presented an improved scheme which attempts to repair the security pitfalls found in Hao et al.’s scheme. In this paper, we found that both Lee’s and Jiang et al.’s authentication schemes have a serious security problem in that a registered user’s secret parameters may be intentionally exposed to many non-registered users and this problem causing the service misuse attack. Therefore, we propose a slight modification on Lee’s scheme to prevent the shortcomings. Compared with previous schemes, our improved scheme not only inherits the advantages of Lee’s and Jiang et al.’s authentication schemes for TMIS but also remedies the serious security weakness of not being able to withstand service misuse attack.     

Cryptanalysis and Improvement of ‘A Privacy Enhanced Scheme for Telecare Medical Information Systems’

To ensure reliable telecare services some user authentication schemes for telecare medical information system (TMIS) have been presented in literature. These schemes are proposed with intent to regulate only authorized access to medical services so that medical information can be protected from misuse. Very recently Jiang et al. proposed a user authentication scheme for TMIS which they claimed to provide enhanced privacy. They made use of symmetric encryption/decryption with cipher block chaining mode (CBC) to achieve the claimed user privacy. Their scheme provides features like user anonymity and user un-traceability unlike its preceding schemes on which it is built. Unluckily, authors overlook some important aspects in designing their scheme due to which it falls short to resist user impersonation attack, guessing attacks and denial of service attack. Besides, its password change phase is not secure; air message confidentiality is at risk and also has some other drawbacks. Therefore, we propose an improved scheme free from problems observed in Jiang et al.’s scheme and more suitable for TMIS.     

Security Enhancement of a Biometric based Authentication Scheme for Telecare Medicine Information Systems with Nonce

The telecare medical information systems (TMISs) support convenient and rapid health-care services. A secure and efficient authentication scheme for TMIS provides safeguarding patients’ electronic patient records (EPRs) and helps health care workers and medical personnel to rapidly making correct clinical decisions. Recently, Kumari et al. proposed a password based user authentication scheme using smart cards for TMIS, and claimed that the proposed scheme could resist various malicious attacks. However, we point out that their scheme is still vulnerable to lost smart card and cannot provide forward secrecy. Subsequently, Das and Goswami proposed a secure and efficient uniqueness-and-anonymity-preserving remote user authentication scheme for connected health care. They simulated their scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool to ensure that their scheme is secure against passive and active attacks. However, we show that their scheme is still vulnerable to smart card loss attacks and cannot provide forward secrecy property. The proposed cryptanalysis discourages any use ofthe two schemes under investigation in practice and reveals some subtleties and challenges in designing this type of schemes.     

ICASME: An Improved Cloud-Based Authentication Scheme for Medical Environment

Unlike the traditional medical system, telecare medicine information system (TMIS) ensures that patients can get health-care services via the Internet at home. Authenticated key agreement protocol is very important for protecting the security in TMIS. Recently scholars have proposed a lot of authenticated key agreement protocols. In 2016, Chiou et al. demonstrated that Chen et al.’s authentication scheme fails to provide user’s anonymity and message authentication and then proposed an enhanced scheme (Chiou et al., J. Med. Syst. 40(4):1–15, 2006) to overcome these drawbacks. In this paper, we demonstrate that Chiou et al.’s scheme is defenseless against key compromise impersonation (KCI) attack and also fails to provide forward security. Moreover, we propose a novel authentication scheme namely ICASME to overcome the mentioned weaknesses in this paper. Security analyses show that ICASME achieves the forward security and KCI attack resistance. In addition, it is proved that the time taken to implement the ICASME is not intolerable compared to the original protocol.     

An Improved Authentication Scheme for Telecare Medicine Information Systems

The telecare medicine information system enables or supports health-care delivery services. In order to safeguard patients' privacy, such as telephone number, medical record number, health information, etc., a secure authentication scheme will thus be in demand. Recently, Wu et?al. proposed a smart card based password authentication scheme for the telecare medicine information system. Later, He et?al. pointed out that Wu et?al.'s scheme could not resist impersonation attacks and insider attacks, and then presented a new scheme. In this paper, we show that both of them fail to achieve two-factor authentication as smart card based password authentication schemes should achieve. We also propose an improved authentication scheme for the telecare medicine information system, and demonstrate that the improved one satisfies the security requirements of two-factor authentication and is also efficient.     

A Secure Smart-Card Based Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Telecare Medicine Information Systems

A smart-card based authentication scheme for telecare medicine information systems enables patients, doctors, nurses, health visitors and the medicine information systems to establish a secure communication platform through public networks. Zhu recently presented an improved authentication scheme in order to solve the weakness of the authentication scheme of Wei et al., where the off-line password guessing attacks cannot be resisted. This investigation indicates that the improved scheme of Zhu has some faults such that the authentication scheme cannot execute correctly and is vulnerable to the attack of parallel sessions. Additionally, an enhanced authentication scheme based on the scheme of Zhu is proposed. The enhanced scheme not only avoids the weakness in the original scheme, but also provides users’ anonymity and authenticated key agreements for secure data communications.     

An Efficient Mutual Authentication Framework for Healthcare System in Cloud Computing

The increasing role of Telecare Medicine Information Systems (TMIS) makes its accessibility for patients to explore medical treatment, accumulate and approach medical data through internet connectivity. Security and privacy preservation is necessary for medical data of the patient in TMIS because of the very perceptive purpose. Recently, Mohit et al.’s proposed a mutual authentication protocol for TMIS in the cloud computing environment. In this work, we reviewed their protocol and found that it is not secure against stolen verifier attack, many logged in patient attack, patient anonymity, impersonation attack, and fails to protect session key. For enhancement of security level, we proposed a new mutual authentication protocol for the similar environment. The presented framework is also more capable in terms of computation cost. In addition, the security evaluation of the protocol protects resilience of all possible security attributes, and we also explored formal security evaluation based on random oracle model. The performance of the proposed protocol is much better in comparison to the existing protocol.     

Improvement of a Privacy Authentication Scheme Based on Cloud for Medical Environment

Medical systems allow patients to receive care at different hospitals. However, this entails considerable inconvenience through the need to transport patients and their medical records between hospitals. The development of Telecare Medicine Information Systems (TMIS) makes it easier for patients to seek medical treatment and to store and access medical records. However, medical data stored in TMIS is not encrypted, leaving patients’ private data vulnerable to external leaks. In 2014, scholars proposed a new cloud-based medical information model and authentication scheme which would not only allow patients to remotely access medical services but also protects patient privacy. However, this scheme still fails to provide patient anonymity and message authentication. Furthermore, this scheme only stores patient medical data, without allowing patients to directly access medical advice. Therefore, we propose a new authentication scheme, which provides anonymity, unlinkability, and message authentication, and allows patients to directly and remotely consult with doctors. In addition, our proposed scheme is more efficient in terms of computation cost. The proposed system was implemented in Android system to demonstrate its workability.     

An Efficient and Secure Dynamic ID-based Authentication Scheme for Telecare Medical Information Systems

The rapidly increased availability of always-on broadband telecommunication environments and lower-cost vital signs monitoring devices bring the advantages of telemedicine directly into the patient's home. Hence, the control of access to remote medical servers' resources has become a crucial challenge. A secure authentication scheme between the medical server and remote users is therefore needed to safeguard data integrity, confidentiality and to ensure availability. Recently, many authentication schemes that use low-cost mobile devices have been proposed to meet these requirements. In contrast to previous schemes, Khan et al. proposed a dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme that reduces computational complexity and includes features such as a provision for the revocation of lost or stolen smart cards and a time expiry check for the authentication process. However, Khan et al.'s scheme has some security drawbacks. To remedy theses, this study proposes an enhanced authentication scheme that overcomes the weaknesses inherent in Khan et al.'s scheme and demonstrated this scheme is more secure and robust for use in a telecare medical information system.     

A More Secure Authentication Scheme for Telecare Medicine Information Systems

It is important to guarantee the privacy and the security of the users in the telecare medicine information system. Recently, Wu et al.’s proposed an authentication scheme for mobile devices in telecare medicine information system. They added the pre-computing idea within the communication process to avoid the time-consuming exponential computations. They also claimed their scheme can withstand various attacks. We will show that their scheme suffers from the impersonation attack to the insider’s attack. In order to overcome the weaknesses, we propose an improved scheme to eliminate the weakness. Our scheme is not only more secure than Wu et al.’s scheme, but also has better performance. Then our scheme is more efficient and appropriate to collocating with low power mobile devices for the telecare medicine information system.     

Three-Factor Anonymous Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Telecare Medicine Information Systems

Nowadays, with comprehensive employment of the internet, healthcare delivery services is provided remotely by telecare medicine information systems (TMISs). A secure mechanism for authentication and key agreement is one of the most important security requirements for TMISs. Recently, Tan proposed a user anonymity preserving three-factor authentication scheme for TMIS. The present paper shows that Tan’s scheme is vulnerable to replay attacks and Denial-of-Service attacks. In order to overcome these security flaws, a new and efficient three-factor anonymous authentication and key agreement scheme for TMIS is proposed. Security and performance analysis shows superiority of the proposed scheme in comparison with previously proposed schemes that are related to security of TMISs.     

Smart Environment as a Service: Three Factor Cloud Based User Authentication for Telecare Medical Information System

The Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS) provides a set of different medical services to the patient and medical practitioner. The patients and medical practitioners can easily connect to the services remotely from their own premises. There are several studies carried out to enhance and authenticate smartcard-based remote user authentication protocols for TMIS system. In this article, we propose a set of enhanced and authentic Three Factor (3FA) remote user authentication protocols utilizing a smartphone capability over a dynamic Cloud Computing (CC) environment. A user can access the TMIS services presented in the form of CC services using his smart device e.g. smartphone. Our framework transforms a smartphone to act as a unique and only identity required to access the TMIS system remotely. Methods, Protocols and Authentication techniques are proposed followed by security analysis and a performance analysis with the two recent authentication protocols proposed for the healthcare TMIS system.     

Secure and Efficient Two-Factor User Authentication Scheme with User Anonymity for Network Based E-Health Care Applications

Benefited from the development of network and communication technologies, E-health care systems and telemedicine have got the fast development. By using the E-health care systems, patient can enjoy the remote medical service provided by the medical server. Medical data are important privacy information for patient, so it is an important issue to ensure the secure of transmitted medical data through public network. Authentication scheme can thwart unauthorized users from accessing services via insecure network environments, so user authentication with privacy protection is an important mechanism for the security of E-health care systems. Recently, based on three factors (password, biometric and smart card), an user authentication scheme for E-health care systems was been proposed by Amin et al., and they claimed that their scheme can withstand most of common attacks. Unfortunate, we find that their scheme cannot achieve the untraceability feature of the patient. Besides, their scheme lacks a password check mechanism such that it is inefficient to find the unauthorized login by the mistake of input a wrong password. Due to the same reason, their scheme is vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attack if the patient updates the password mistakenly by using a wrong password. In order improve the security level of authentication scheme for E-health care application, a robust user authentication scheme with privacy protection is proposed for E-health care systems. Then, security prove of our scheme are analysed. Security and performance analyses show that our scheme is more powerful and secure for E-health care systems when compared with other related schemes.     

An Improved Two-Layer Authentication Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) comprises a number of sensor nodes and the portable mobile device such as smartphone. It is used to monitor the physical condition and provide a reliable healthcare system. Utilizing the wireless communication network, sensor nodes collect the physiological data of one patient to the portable mobile device and the latter analyzes and transmits them to the application providers. Therefore, the personal data confidentiality and user privacy are cores of WBANs. Recently, Shen et al. presented a multi-layer authentication protocol for WBANs, which is lightweight and much easier to implement. However, we observe that their authentication between sensor nodes and the portable mobile device could ensure the forward security property only when the sensor nodes are changed (add or delete). When the sensor nodes are constant, the security property is not satisfied. Meanwhile, the authentication between the portable mobile device and application provider is prone to mutual impersonation attack, so the critical goal of mutual authentication can not be achieved. In this paper, an improved two-layer authentication scheme is proposed to remove the flaws. The analysis shows that our method is more secure and could withstand various attacks.     

Design of a Secure Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme Preserving User Privacy Usable in Telecare Medicine Information Systems

Authentication and key agreement schemes play a very important role in enhancing the level of security of telecare medicine information systems (TMISs). Recently, Amin and Biswas demonstrated that the authentication scheme proposed by Giri et al. is vulnerable to off-line password guessing attacks and privileged insider attacks and also does not provide user anonymity. They also proposed an improved authentication scheme, claiming that it resists various security attacks. However, this paper demonstrates that Amin and Biswas’s scheme is defenseless against off-line password guessing attacks and replay attacks and also does not provide perfect forward secrecy. This paper also shows that Giri et al.’s scheme not only suffers from the weaknesses pointed out by Amin and Biswas, but it also is vulnerable to replay attacks and does not provide perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, this paper proposes a novel authentication and key agreement scheme to overcome the mentioned weaknesses. Security and performance analyses show that the proposed scheme not only overcomes the mentioned security weaknesses, but also is more efficient than the previous schemes.     

A Novel User Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Accessing Multi-Medical Server Usable in TMIS

Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS) makes an efficient and convenient connection between patient(s)/user(s) at home and doctor(s) at a clinical center. To ensure secure connection between the two entities (patient(s)/user(s), doctor(s)), user authentication is enormously important for the medical server. In this regard, many authentication protocols have been proposed in the literature only for accessing single medical server. In order to fix the drawbacks of the single medical server, we have primarily developed a novel architecture for accessing several medical services of the multi-medical server, where a user can directly communicate with the doctor of the medical server securely. Thereafter, we have developed a smart card based user authentication and key agreement security protocol usable for TMIS system using cryptographic one-way hash function. We have analyzed the security of our proposed authentication scheme through both formal and informal security analysis. Furthermore, we have simulated the proposed scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and showed that the scheme is secure against the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The informal security analysis is also presented which confirms that the protocol has well security protection on the relevant security attacks. The security and performance comparison analysis confirm that the proposed protocol not only provides security protection on the above mentioned attacks, but it also achieves better complexities along with efficient login and password change phase.     

Privacy-Preserving and Efficient Truly Three-Factor Authentication Scheme for Telecare Medical Information Systems

Significant development of information technologies has made Telecare Medical Information Systems (TMISs) increasingly popular. In a TMIS, patients upload their medical data through smart devices to obtain a doctor’s diagnosis. However, these smart devices have limited computing and storage capacities, so it is difficult to store substantial patient information and to support time-consuming operations. Moreover, although many three-factor authentication protocols have been proposed for TMISs, the problems of privacy leaks and other security flaws are serious. In addition, authentication factors are verified at the user side in most protocols, giving users a high level of trust and resulting in a potential lack of security. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient truly three-factor authentication protocol for TMISs. In our proposed protocol, three factors (i.e., password, smart card and biometrics) are verified at the server side, which reduces the storage and computational burden of the user side. Additionally, our proposed protocol uses only lightweight operators and is thus efficient. A formal proof analysis demonstrates that our proposed protocol is provably secure in the random oracle model. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol is very efficient and suitable for TMISs.     

A Provably Secure RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Elliptic Curve for Healthcare Environments

To enhance the quality of healthcare in the management of chronic disease, telecare medical information systems have increasingly been used. Very recently, Zhang and Qi (J. Med. Syst. 38(5):47, 32), and Zhao (J. Med. Syst. 38(5):46, 33) separately proposed two authentication schemes for telecare medical information systems using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. They claimed that their protocols achieve all security requirements including forward secrecy. However, this paper demonstrates that both Zhang and Qi’s scheme, and Zhao’s scheme could not provide forward secrecy. To augment the security, we propose an efficient RFID authentication scheme using elliptic curves for healthcare environments. The proposed RFID scheme is secure under common random oracle model.