Efficient Mutual Authentication Protocol between Hospital Internet of Things Devices Using Probabilistic Attribute Information

Wearable and portable medical devices are one of the fastest growing sectors in the Internet of Things (IoT) market. However, medical services specialize in the processing of personal health data, which carries issues that are not faced by other industries. In this paper, we propose a multi-dimensional color vector information based IoT device authentication protocol that can provide benefits for medical work, assuming that a hospital has the capability of integrating IoT devices and has access to patient information. The proposed protocol uses multi-dimensional color vectors to help users who use IoT devices to manage their condition in multiple groups, stochastically. In addition, the proposed protocol provides the health and medical service status of users to medical staff in real time using IoT authentication keys generated through the proposed multi-dimensional color vectors. The proposed protocol not only addresses health care problems yet to be tackled in the management of hospital and health services, but also minimizes administrative time and procedures for current medical services. As a result of the performance evaluation, the proposed protocol improved the efficiency of hospital IoT devices by an average of 31.1%, and the time delay for medical services was improved by 19.8%, compared to the existing protocol. By using the proposed protocol and IoT devices, the average overhead of healthcare providers could be reduced by as much as 15.3%.