Fast and Lightweight Authenticated Group Key Agreement Realizing Privacy Protection for Resource-Constrained IoMT

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is mainly composed of patients, doctors and medical data collection equipment. In IoMT, the health data of patients is collected in real-time through mobile devices and stored in the network servers for access by legitimate medical personnel to facilitate monitoring, diagnosis and treatment services for patients. To securely transmit various types of data is the essential task of secure group communications for Internet of Things (IoMT). Collected data in IoMT have the particularity of being heterogeneous. At the same time, IoMT networks is exposed to some security threats caused by various attacks, as well as efficiency challenges caused by limited communication range and limited energy. Thus, how to securely group communicate and compute heterogeneous data between resource-constrained IoMT devices is a crucial problem to be solved. Due to the lightweight computational overhead required for group key agreement in resource-constrained environments, traditional protocols are not effectively applied by researchers in the IoMT. Based on symmetric binary polynomial and XOR operation, a lightweight and fast member authentication group key agreement is presented, which can be effectively applied in resource-constrained IoMT. The proposed scheme realizes the functions of membership authentication and group key negotiation, while improving the communication efficiency of group members. In terms of security, our scheme is resistant to both internal and external attacks and can satisfy all the defined security properties. Furthermore, using the logic XOR operation as the main operation method ensures that the computation cost in this protocol is lightweight. More importantly, in our proposal, the communication consumption at each group member end is not affected by the size of group, where the communication method between members is in a non-interactive and broadcast way. In consequence, our protocol provides a more efficient communication and computational process compared to recently proposed cryptographic schemes. Hence, this proposal is an excellent choice for solving membership authentication and group key agreement problems in resource-constrained IoMT systems.