Lease: lattice and ecc-based authentication and integrity verification scheme in e-healthcare

Abstract

Security has become one of major concern especially in critical applications like e-healthcare. To cater to the security needs in e-healthcare, this paper proposes a novel scheme which prevents data from unauthorized fabrication and preserves the integrity of data. The proposed scheme also removes overhead of integrity validation from user's end as this work is assigned to a trusted third party, i.e., a proxy server. For this purpose, the patient's data given by user is sent to proxy server along with user's signature where it is broken down in the form of blocks. A `tag' is then generated for each block using lightweight elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). This block-tag pair is then uploaded on the data server which is used for integrity checking. Whenever a patient's data access request is raised, the block of data is retrieved using tag value and integrity is then verified. In addition to it, a lightweight lattice-based authentication scheme is proposed in the paper to authenticate the users. The request is served only when the user is deemed authentic and there is no modification in the original data sent by the user. The effectiveness of the proposed authentication scheme has been proven by performing its analysis in terms of computation time and communication cost. Moreover, the superiority of the proposed data integrity scheme has been validated by comparing it with the traditional discrete logarithmic scheme.