A secure and lightweight hash-based mutual authentication scheme in fog-assisted healthcare network

Security and privacy are considered the two main challenges in fog-assisted healthcare networks. Several authentication approaches have been presented in recent years to address the security issues in fog-assisted healthcare networks. To cope with these challenges and improve the safety of fog-assisted healthcare networks, we propose a secure and efficient mutual authentication scheme. In this paper, we design a lightweight hash-based authentication scheme for fog-assisted healthcare networks to provide security against various attacks. The informal security analysis illustrates that the proposed scheme has the capability to resist various security threats. In addition, the proposed scheme has been evaluated with a real-or-random (ROR) model to prove its resilience against cryptographic attacks. The performance study demonstrates that the proposed scheme is more effective and lightweight compared to existing schemes. Moreover, a comprehensive comparison analysis has been undertaken, which shows the proposed scheme provides better security features than existing schemes.