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A Reliable RFID Mutual Authentication Scheme for Healthcare Environments

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Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) applications have the potential to increase the reliability of healthcare environments. However, there are obvious security and privacy concerns with regard to storing personal and medical data in RFID tags, and the lack of secure authentication systems in healthcare environments remains as a challenge the further use of this technology, one that touches on issues of confidentiality, unforgeability, location privacy, and scalability. This study proposes a novel mutual authentication protocol that considers all of these issues and solves the tradeoff between location privacy and scalability in healthcare environments. A formal proof and analysis is demonstrated to prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, and that high reliability has and can be easily deployed and managed. This study also provides a scenario example that applied proposed protocol in the newborn care and management. The result shows that the proposed scheme solves the related tradeoff problem, and is capable of providing both location privacy and scalability. To apply the authentication scheme proposed in this work would be able to increase confidence in future implementations of RFID systems in healthcare environments.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported partially by National Science Council, Taiwan under Grants NSC 101-2218-E-346-001.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management, National Penghu University of Science and Technology, Penghu, Taiwan

    Zhen-Yu Wu & Ju-Chuan Wu

  2. Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan

    Lichin Chen

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  1. Zhen-Yu Wu
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  2. Lichin Chen
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Correspondence to Lichin Chen.

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Wu, ZY., Chen, L. & Wu, JC. A Reliable RFID Mutual Authentication Scheme for Healthcare Environments. J Med Syst 37, 9917 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-012-9917-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-012-9917-0

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