Anonymous Dynamic Group Authenticated Key Agreements Using Physical Unclonable Functions for Internet of Medical Things

Group authenticated key agreements (GAKAs) for an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) enable medical sensor devices to authenticate each other and agree upon a common session key. These medical sensor devices can then establish a secure channel using this session key and exchange information securely. Owing to hardware limitations, sensors do not have sufficient computing power, energy, and storage resources to implement burdensome protocols. Moreover, sensors are easily damaged, causing the number of members of the group to change. Therefore, a group key agreement (GKA) protocol is required to consider dynamic groups and reduce the computational cost of an IoMT. The physical unclonable function (PUF) uses the uniqueness and randomness of its circuit to perform calculations. It has message fingerprints so that the user is not necessary to store a private key. The PUF is less computationally burdensome than the more common modular exponentiation and can be applied in an IoMT environment with limited resources. This article develops lightweight anonymous dynamic GAKA (DGAKA) that uses the PUF to solve the problems of data storage, transmission security, and computing efficiency that are faced by the IoMT. The proposed protocol has higher security and efficiency in computation and storage than those previously developed.