Secure and lightweight remote patient authentication scheme with biometric inputs for mobile healthcare environments (original) (raw)

2017, Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing

The mobile devices such as cell phones, personal digital assistants and smartphones, have gained increasingly popular due to their portability (Stojmenović 2002). People use these devices to accomplish remote operations anytime and anywhere (Yoon et al. 2012). In distributed healthcare applications, these devices are now able to collect individual health-related data and report them to healthcare professionals situated anywhere. These data allow for distributed care, enabling remote diagnoses, alerting doctors for an emergency intervention or to changing conditions as they occur and providing the total picture of the patient's health so that necessary care can be administered. When an unexpected incident underwent on the health of a patient, the latter may be not able to authenticate itself using something he/she knows as passwords. In such critical situation, the authentication process should be done automatically without the patient intervention. A biometric-based authentication scheme responds well to this important requirement. Biometrics (Ross et al. 2008; Doshi and Nirgude 2015) is the study of measuring physiological or behavioral characteristics of a person to verify or recognize his or her identity. These characteristics include features, like fingerprints, face, hand geometry, voice and iris (Jain et al. 2004; Sonkamble et al. 2010; Jayaram and Fleyeh 2013). Every person possesses biometric features, which are unique and its properties remain stable during one's lifetime (Moolla et al. 2012; Al-Ani 2014; Doshi and Nirgude 2015; Sabah et al. 2015). In classical biometric-based authentication methods, the identification of a user is performed through a specific analytical comparison between the introduced user's biometric data and the prior stored one (Tong et al. 2007). In mobile environments, this process introduces hard constraints on computation, storage and communication, respectively, when