Secure and lightweight remote patient authentication scheme with biometric inputs for mobile healthcare environments

Biometrics is an emerging technology for patient authentication due to its advantages over the other methods, as passwords and smart cards. However, in mobile environments, it introduces hard constraints on computation, storage and communication, respectively, when analyzing, saving and transmitting the patient biometric data. In this paper, we address these challenges and we propose a secure and lightweight remote patient authentication scheme for mobile healthcare environments. The proposed scheme translates the patient biometric data to ECC-based keys. When a remote diagnostic is required or an unexpected incident underwent on the health of a patient, the latter can be securely and cost-effectively authenticated without needing to save or communicate its biometric template. Through simulations, we conduct an overall evaluation of the proposed scheme compared to concurrent solutions. The results indicate out performance of the proposed scheme while providing effective security.