An efficient and authenticated key establishment scheme based on fog computing for healthcare system

Because of its closeness to users, fog computing responds faster than cloud computing. Thus, it has been deployed to various applications, such as healthcare system. Recently, to ensure the secure communication of the fog-based healthcare system, Jia et al. proposed an authenticated key agreement scheme. Moreover, in view of the high computation cost existing in Jia et al.’s scheme, Ma et al. presented an efficient one using elliptic curve cryptography. In this paper, we observe that both the two schemes may potentially risk ephemeral key compromise attacks and need improving. Therefore, to overcome this potential risk, we propose a new authenticated scheme based on Jia et al.’s scheme using elliptic curve computational Diffie-Hellman hypothesis and hash functions. Additionally, we provide provable security under the adopted adversarial model and ProVerif simulation, and also analyze the performance in terms of computation and communication costs by comparisons. The analysis results show that the improved scheme resists the common attacks, reduces computation overhead, and has a certain significance.