Amassing the Security: An Enhanced Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Remote Surgery in Healthcare Environment

Abstract

The development of the Internet of Things has facilitated the rapid development of various industries. With the improvement in people’s living standards, people’s health requirements are steadily improving. However, owing to the scarcity of medical and health care resources in some areas, the demand for remote surgery has gradually increased. In this paper, we investigate remote surgery in the healthcare environment. Surgeons can operate robotic arms to perform remote surgery for patients, which substantially facilitates successful surgeries and saves lives. Recently, Kamil et al. proposed a secure protocol for surgery in the healthcare environment. However, after cryptanalyzing their protocol, we deduced that their protocols are vulnerable to temporary value disclosure and insider attacks. Therefore, we design an improved authentication and key agreement protocol for remote surgeries in the healthcare environment. Accordingly, we adopt the real or random (ROR) model and an automatic verification tool Proverif to verify the security of our protocol. Via security analysis and performance comparison, it is confirmed that our protocol is a relatively secure protocol.