Anonymous Authentication Protocols for IoT based- Healthcare Systems: A survey

Nowadays, with the increase in chronic diseases and the aging population in all countries, it has become a huge burden on hospitals to accommodate all patients and monitor them. Applying wireless sensors network for the IoT based medical systems enabled medical doctors and families to monitor patients' conditions all the time through the collected data from sensors connected to the patients. These sensitive data should be transmitted through secure channels to hospitals or medical centers. Many proposals in the literature have suggested solutions to IoT supported medical systems security issues. In this paper we present a review of the most relevant techniques that address the security in general and Anonymous Authentication particularly in the context of healthcare systems. Furthermore, we compare between these approaches in term of types of security attacks, security measures, the approaches that were used to solve some of the security issues, and the network technology used such as WSN and RFID. We found that every approach has some drawbacks regarding security attacks and security measures. Security attacks such as denial of service and modification attacks should be given more attention in future research. The same goes for security measures like non-traceability, and backward and forward secrecy. Moreover, 80%of authentication schemes use certificateless authentication. This type of authentication has low computation cost and saves energy which is convenient to the constrained devices. AVISPA and Ban logic are the most common tools used for validation in the surveyed approaches. A comparison between these techniques according to different features is illustrated which may help the researchers to easily identify the gaps in the surveyed approaches so as to propose solutions for these issues.