Securing the Internet of Health Things with Certificateless Anonymous Authentication Scheme

Internet of Health Things (IoHT) is a subset of Internet of Things (IoT) technology that includes interconnected medical devices and sensors used in medical and healthcare information systems. However, IoHT is susceptible to cybersecurity threats due to its reliance on low-power biomedical devices and the use of open wireless channels for communication. In this article, we intend to address this shortcoming, and as a result, we propose a new scheme called, the certificateless anonymous authentication (CAA) scheme. The proposed scheme is based on hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC), an enhanced variant of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) that employs a smaller key size of 80 bits as compared to 160 bits. The proposed scheme is secure against various attacks in both formal and informal security analyses. The formal study makes use of the Real-or-Random (ROR) model. A thorough comparative study of the proposed scheme is conducted for the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme with the relevant existing schemes. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only ensures high security for health-related data but also increases efficiency. The proposed scheme’s computation cost is 2.88 ms, and the communication cost is 1440 bits, which shows its better efficiency compared to its counterpart schemes.