A lightweight and secure authentication and privacy protection scheme for internet of medical things

The advent of smart healthcare technology has provided various benefits, including remote patient monitoring, personalized treatments, and early disease detection. However, transmitting sensitive patient data through IoMT devices raises significant security and privacy concerns. To protect patients’ data and smart medical devices, authentication is required. We uncovered security flaws in the current healthcare architecture, including impersonation, stolen verifiers, and man-in-the-middle attacks. This encouraged us to propose a security architecture that protects patients’ data from attacks and guarantees the security of sensitive healthcare information. Our proposed security scheme, ฿-ED-CRY (Bi Encryption Decryption Crypto), is based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). It protects patients’ sensitive healthcare information by enhancing privacy-preserving mechanisms and validates the effectiveness of our scheme. We implemented the proposed scheme using GCC 4.9.5 and the pairing-based cryptography (PBC) library. The results demonstrate that our scheme performs better than the existing security schemes in terms of privacy and computational efficiency. The computation cost is around 13.3640 percentage lower than other related schemes. This research explores the revolutionary effects of integrated healthcare systems, with an emphasis on the convergence of digital health technologies and patient treatment in real-world IoMT scenarios.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-05910-4