An efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme with enhanced security for IoMT applications

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), an essential application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in the health sector, is of great practical importance in improving healthcare quality and reducing healthcare costs and errors. For years, researchers have designed many cryptographic schemes for securing IoMT applications. However, in this work, we reveal that the state-of-the-art cloud-centric IoMT-based smart healthcare system cannot be deployed in real-world scenarios by proposing a concrete signature forgery attack on their underlying pairing-based homomorphic certificateless signature (CLS) scheme. Then we present a new CLS scheme without pairings and formally prove its security under the standard cryptographic assumption. Based on our design, we put forward a new secure and efficient IoMT-based smart healthcare system. The performance comparison results illustrate the practicality of our construction.