Towards Designing an Efficient Authentication Scheme for RFID-based Healthcare Applications in Vehicular Mobile Cloud

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading wireless technologies in the field of Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC). With its increasing popularity amongst the researchers and industries, it has been successful in paving its way to the healthcare domain. Potential healthcare applications of RFID are limited to tracking of assets and monitoring of patients inside the hospital premises. However, with an exponential increase in internet users, there is a steep increase in mobile healthcare solutions. So, this thesis proposes a novel healthcare application using RFID-enabled devices, which aims to monitor the patients’ health while they travel outside the hospital premises. Integration of vehicular cloud computing (VCC) and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) has been proposed in this work to provide uninterrupted services to the patients even on-the-fly. However, potential security breaches in such an environment may lead to various types of issues such as-information leakage, identity revelation, tracking, etc. Thus, privacy needs to be embedded in such applications so as to maintain highest levels of privacy and authenticity at all times. In order to address these issues, this thesis proposes an intelligent authentication scheme for RFID-enabled healthcare applications in VCC environment. In the proposed scheme, both server and tag authentications are protected by the strong Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) based key generation mechanism. The proposed scheme is found to be secure as it establishes mutual authentication between the server and tags while protecting against replay, tracking, eavesdropping, cloning, and forward secrecy risks. Moreover, evaluation of the proposed authentication scheme with respect to various parameters such as-storage requirements, communicational overhead generated, and computational complexity provides better performance in comparison with the existing schemes. In addition to this, the formal security verification of the proposed protocol is also presented using an automated tool-AVISPA. The obtained results indicate that the protocol is suitable for RFID-enabled devices and provides better security than its previous counterparts.