A lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol for remote surgery application in Tactile Internet environment

The emergence of the fifth generation (5G) networks has revolutionized the cyberspace due to its ultra-low latency, huge capacity, higher data rate, and more reliable connections. One of such technological innovations is Tactile Internet which means remotely transmitting a physical sense of touch. Tactile Internet supports a number of realtime interaction applications such as augmented reality, virtual reality, gaming, smart grid, and ehealthcare. In the context of ehealthcare, Tactile Internet allows a surgeon to remotely operate a patient by implementing some control actions via a robotic system and receiving a haptic feedback. Although, the ultimate goal of this auspicious technology is to safe human lives, the aim may be jeopardized if proper security measures are not implemented. Any unauthorized access to the robotic system may lead to wrong surgical procedures that can cause havoc or even result to death. To this end, we develop an ultraefficient mutual authentication and key agreement protocol for Tactile Internet-assisted remote surgery application. The protocol is designed using a few cryptographic hash function and exclusive-OR operations. The security of the proposed protocol is demonstrated formally using Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, formal security verification using Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) toolkit and the generally-acknowledged Burrows–Abadi–Nedham (BAN) Logic, and information security analysis to corroborate the results of the formal security analyses. The functionality comparison and numerical analysis show the superiority of the proposed protocol over the state-of-the-art schemes. The experimental simulation reveals that the protocol is very efficient and suitable for practical deployment. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.