Blockchain-assisted handover authentication for intelligent telehealth in multi-server edge computing environment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sysarc.2021.102024Get rights and content

Abstract

Intelligent telehealth system (ITS) provides patients and medical institutions with a lot of convenience, medical institutions can achieve medical services for patients in time through monitored health data. However, as the scope of people's daily activities extends, the traditional single-server architecture is no longer applicable. To deal with this problem, a multi-server architecture has been proposed recently while there remains security and privacy challenges, including handover authentication. In this paper, we investigate a blockchain-assisted handover authentication and key agreement scheme for ITS in a multi-server edge computing environment. Specifically, we first propose a novel handover authentication model of ITS with multi-server edge computing architecture. Second, the proposed handover authentication scheme allows the authenticated server to assist users subsequently authenticate with other server, thereby achieving interactions with the server anytime and anywhere with low overhead. Finally, blockchain technology and strong anonymity mechanism are introduced to protect users’ privacy strictly. To our best knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first in the literature to provide efficient authentication, strict anonymity and computational load transfer simultaneously. The security analysis and performance evaluation show that our scheme can not only satisfy the security requirements but also achieve higher efficiency in computation and communication cost.

Introduction

As the rapid integration of Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, edge/cloud computing and other information and communication technologies [1, 2], a series of innovative intelligent applications [3], [4], [5], [6] have been spawned to facilitate people's daily life. One of the most promising applications is the smart health care system. Particularly, the edge-based intelligent telehealth system (ITS) has become a research hotspot in both industry and academia these years. In the ITS patients’ physiological data is uploaded to edge servers for instantly data analysis and preprocessing, so that patients can quickly obtain the appropriate medical service. Afterwards, edge servers send data to the remote cloud center for storage or further processing. In the real world, the range of people's activity has not been constrained any more due to the convenience of social network and transportation channels, however the service area covered geographically by each edge server is still limited. As thus, multiple servers are required to provide services for mobile users, and users can achieve seamless access between multiple servers, which is defined as “handover”. Unfortunately, most existing single-server authentication protocols cannot be directly applied to multi-server scenarios, because it may cause a series of problems, such as redundant operations and high latency, which would become a bottleneck in the practical application of ITS. To deal with this problem better, a multi-server edge computing architecture was proposed for ITS. Wherein, the patient can interact with different edge servers to obtain appropriate medical services with no limit on time and space. A typical multi-server edge computing architecture for ITS is shown in Fig. 1.

Although ITS brings significant advantages to our everyday life, several inevitable challenges remain when achieving its large-scale deployment, particularly in terms of security and privacy issues. For example, patients’ personal privacy information and physiological data could be targeted by attackers because of its commercial value. In order to ensure the secure communication in ITS, researchers mostly adopted the authenticated key agreement (AKA) security protocol, which is admittedly the basis of secure communication. Without sending any sensitive information over an open channel, communicators can negotiate a common session key by verifying each other's identity prior to further secure communication according to AKA protocols. In most existing protocols for the multi-server architecture, user terminals are generally required to register again and re-authenticate with edge servers when performing the handover, which is unacceptable for the user terminal with constrained computation and storage ability. Thus, they are not suitable for practical applications of ITS. To reduce the user terminal's burden and guarantee secure communications, it is urgent to construct a secure and efficient multi-server handover AKA protocols for ITS.

Achieving the above goals is not an easy task. Efficiency is one of the most important practical challenges in design. In some schemes, the user terminal needs to re-register in each of the common service region of which the cloud is in charge. Afterwards, if he/she switches to one new edge server for interaction, the authentication operations as before will take place again. In other words, the user terminal is required to submit vital materials to the new edge server again for identity verification, so that a new session key can be generated. Due to the limited computing power, storage space and energy sources nature of IoT devices [7], another design challenge is how to cut down the computation overhead on the user side. If the user terminal needs to re-authenticate individually with each edge server, this is computationally expensive for him/her. In addition, the number of edge servers continues to increase, resulting in a linearly growing burden on the user side. Therefore, it is necessary to diverge from the conventional path, regarding the authenticated edge server as an assistance to complete the handover authentication process.

Privacy protection is another nontrivial challenge in ITS as users (patients) are deeply reluctant to disclose their privacy-related information such as the identity, position, and roaming route, etc. To protect their privacy, anonymity mechanism is generally employed in ITS. However, most existing protocols only consider the anonymity in the public channel transmission, that is, attackers cannot obtain the real identities of patients even if they intercept the transmitted information. As these protocols describe, edge servers are generally considered trustworthy and would keep patients’ sensitive information confidentially. However, many organizations in reality may covet these sensitive information for commercial value. Such an assumption may not be reasonable. Consequently, a strict anonymity mechanism is urgently needed to solve the above issues.

Blockchain [8], [9], [10] is a new application mode integrating point-to-point transmission, consensus mechanism, cryptography, smart contract, distributed data storage and other computer technologies. The tamper-proof and traceable features of blockchain system [11, 12] ensure the auditability of data operation, thus ensuring the security of data. Therefore, blockchain is widely used in various intelligent applications [13], [14], [15]. Motivated by the characteristics of blockchain, we can combine it with the existing edge/cloud-based smart medical data management platform.

To the best of our knowledge, there has not been a comprehensive handover AKA scheme designed for multi-server edge computing environment according to the characteristics of ITS. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-assisted extensible handover AKA protocol for ITS in multi-server edge computing environment. As far as we know, the proposed scheme is the first in the literature to provide efficient authentication, strict anonymity and computational load transfer simultaneously. Specifically, three main contributions of the proposed scheme are given as follows:

  • We design a novel handover AKA scheme for intelligent telehealth system (ITS) in the multi-server edge computing environment. Users need to register in the key generation center (KGC) only once in the entire handover authentication. During the handover process, users can authenticate with the nearest edge server flexibly following their movement.

  • The authenticated edge server is used to assist the subsequent authentication process in which the user does not need to execute some duplicate operations (i.e., submitting identity-related materials). In this way, the communication and computation overheads on the user side can be alleviated effectively.

  • Strict privacy protection, benefitting from blockchain technology and strong anonymity mechanism, is also achieved. No entity including the edge server can acquire the patient's real identity information.

  • The security analysis shows that our proposal can satisfy the security requirements of ITS. In addition, the performance comparison and analysis are given in detail, the results of which show that our proposal is superior in computation and communication cost, which indicates that it is suitable for applying to the real-world scenarios.

The rest of this article is arranged as follows. The related work is introduced in Section 2. Section 3 puts forward the system model, system assumptions and design goals. The proposed scheme is described in Section 4. Correctness proof and security analysis are elaborated in Section 5. Performance analysis is presented in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 concludes the whole paper.

Section snippets

Related work

As the traditional AKA protocol is not suitable for multi-server environment, researchers have put forward a series of corresponding solutions [16], [17], [18], [19] in recent years. Wazid et al. [20] discussed the network and threat model of authentication mechanism and analyzed the security requirements and security issues challenges in cloud-driven IoT-based big data environment. To enhance security, He et al. [18] designed an efficient anonymous mobile user authentication protocol for

Preliminaries

In this section, the system model, system assumptions and design goals are described in detail.

Overview

In this subsection, we broadly introduce the main workflow of the proposed scheme, as shown in Fig. 2.

  • (1)

    System Initialization: KGC executes the Setup algorithm to generate the system master key and public parameters param, where the master key should be kept secretly.

  • (2)

    Registration: KGC is in charge of completing the registration process of patient U and ESs, which is labeled as step ① in Fig. 2. On receiving the U’s real identity, KGC generates the identity-based pseudonym and partial secret key

Correctness proof

The correctness of our scheme is derived as follows:

• Between U and ES1

Since:K1=s1·(RU+H1(XU,PIDU,RU)Ppub)=s1·(rU+sH1(XU,PIDU,RU))P=s1sUPK2=b·A+x1XU=abP+x1xUPK3=sU·(R1+H1(ID1,R1)Ppub)=sUs1P=K1K4=a·B+xUX1=abP+xUx1P=K2

• Between U and ES2

Since:K5=A+x2XU=cA+x2xUP=cbA+x2xUP=cbaP+x2xUPK6=aB+xUX2=acB+x2xUP=abcP+x2xUP=K5

From the above derivation, we can prove that SK1=SKU1=SK1U and SK2=SKU2=SK2U. Hence, our scheme is provably correct.

Security and requirements analysis

In this section, we will show that the protocol can meet the

Performance analysis

In this section, we evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of computation, communication and storage cost. Without loss of generality, we assume a scenario where a user first authenticates with ES1 and then switches to authenticating with ES2. To testify the performance of the proposed scheme, we first compare our proposed scheme with some of the recently related works [21, 22, 39]. In addition, to manifest the advantages of the proposed scheme, we have added a comparison with

Conclusion and future work

To solve the security and privacy problems in the multi-server environment, especially the handover authentication, this paper proposed an efficient and extensible blockchain-assisted handover AKA scheme for ITS in a multi-server edge computing environment. The main contribution of this paper is that the proposal can provide efficient authentication, strict anonymity and computational load transfer simultaneously. In the proposed scheme, we used blockchain technology and strong anonymity

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported in part by National Key Research and Development Program (2018YFB0803403), in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62072252, 61872194), in part by the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (KYCX19_0908) and in part by the Key Project on Anhui Provincial Natural Science Study by Colleges and Universities (KJ2019A0579, KJ2019A0554, KJ2017A352).

Wenming Wang received the M.S. degree from the College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China, in 2014. He is currently a Lecturer with the School of Computer and Information, Anqing Normal University. He is pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, simultaneously. His research interests include Internet of Things and information security.

References (47)

  • F.R. Yu

    Advanced information and communication technology for connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles

    IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol.

    (2017)
  • K. Gai et al.

    Permissioned blockchain and edge computing empowered privacy-preserving smart grid networks

    IEEE Internet Things J.

    (2019)
  • L. Zhu et al.

    Big data analytics in intelligent transportation systems: a survey

    IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst.

    (2019)
  • K.W. Sha et al.

    A secure and efficient framework to read isolated smart grid devices

    IEEE Trans. Smart Grid

    (2017)
  • M. Chen et al.

    Smart home 2.0: Innovative smart home system powered by botanical IoT and emotion detection

    Mobile Netw. Appl.

    (2017)
  • T. Wang et al.

    Edge-based auditing method for data security in resource-constrained Internet of Things

    J. Syst. Archit.

    (2020)
  • Q. Feng et al.

    BPAS: blockchain-assisted privacy-preserving authentication system for vehicular ad hoc networks

    IEEE Trans. Ind. Inform.

    (2020)
  • S. Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Consulted, 1–9. doi:10.1007/s10838-008-9062-0. Consulted....
  • A. Refaey et al.

    A blockchain policy and charging control framework for roaming in cellular networks

    IEEE Netw.

    (2020)
  • X.C. Liu et al.

    A blockchain-based trust management with conditional privacy-preserving announcement scheme for VANETs

    IEEE Internet Things J.

    (2020)
  • S. Guo et al.

    Blockchain meets edge computing: a distributed and trusted authentication system

    IEEE Trans. Ind. Inform.

    (2020)
  • S. Mandal et al.

    Certificateless-signcryption-based three-factor user access control scheme for IoT environment

    IEEE Internet Things J.

    (2020)
  • X. Zeng et al.

    E-AUA: an efficient anonymous user authentication protocol for mobile IoT

    IEEE Internet Things J.

    (2019)
  • Cited by (0)

    Wenming Wang received the M.S. degree from the College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China, in 2014. He is currently a Lecturer with the School of Computer and Information, Anqing Normal University. He is pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, simultaneously. His research interests include Internet of Things and information security.

    Haiping Huang received the B.Eng. degree and M.Eng. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in 2002 and 2005, respectively; and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Application Technology from Soochow University, Suzhou, China, in 2009. From May 2013 to November 2013, he was a Visiting Scholar with the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, U.K. He is currently a professor and Ph.D. supervisor with the School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China. His research interests include information security and data privacy in IoT.

    Lingyan Xue received the B.E. degrees in Computer Science and Technology from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in 2020. She is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China. Her main research interests include cryptography and information security, in particular, cryptographic protocols.

    Qi Li is an associate professor at School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer system architecture from Xidian University, Xi'an, China, in 2014. His research interests include cloud security, information security and applied cryptography.

    Reza Malekian (M’10–SM’17) is currently a full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Media Technology, Malmö University, Sweden and an Extraordinary Professor in Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering, University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research focuses on the connectivity and advanced sensor networks in intelligent transportation systems. He is Chartered Engineer (CEng) and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE T INTELL TRANSP and IEEE IoTJ.

    Youzhi Zhang is an associate professor at School of Computer and Information, Anqing Normal University, China. He received the M.S. degree in signal and information processing from Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, China, in 2004. His research interests include big data, information security.

    View full text