A lightweight remote user authentication protocol for smart E-health networking environment

Internet of Things (IoT) is the key enabling technology in the electronic health (e-health) management systems. However, the challenges in secure communication in IoT need to be addressed carefully for large and commercial deployment of e-health applications. Key management is a basic requirement for accomplishing secure IoT smart environments. However, constrained resources in IoT raises real difficulties achieving this goal. In this paper, we propose a secure key management and authentication protocol, making use of hybrid cryptography that involves both symmetric and certificate-less public key cryptographic algorithms. In this protocol, the constrained nodes contribute only in the symmetric algorithms. The performance evaluation and comparison results of the proposed protocol show its ability to satisfy the security requirements in IoT e-health environments.