Dual cooperative RFID-telecare medicine information system authentication protocol for healthcare environments.

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology is used in a wide variety of applications, more recently as a leading identification technology in healthcare environments. In the most recent years, this technology has been adopted for telecare medicine information system (TMIS) for authentication, safety, security, data confidentiality, and patient's privacy protection over public networks. TMIS is the bridge between patients at home and doctors at healthcare organizations that permits to validate the correctness of exchanged information between different actors of the system. Recently, several RFID and smart cards authentication schemes have been presented and suggested for the TMIS in the literature. These schemes try to resolve the security and privacy problems over insecure healthcare network environments by exploiting different cryptographic primitive's solutions. In this paper, we first highlighted the vulnerabilities of the most recent proposed protocol for TMIS in the literature and proposed attacks based on the weaknesses related to the misuse of the timestamp technique, the calculation of the reader request and tag response messages using the one-way hash function, which are not attentively scrutinized. Second, we propose an efficient dual RFID-TMIS mobile authentication protocol with high efficiency and security for healthcare systems. Our proposal is an improvement and extension of the protocol of Li et al., where we propose to associate the RFID technology with TMIS in the same authentication system to take advantages of both these two promising technologies. The performance analysis shows that our improved protocol could solve security weaknesses of the studied protocol and provide mobility, efficiency and is well suited for TMIS adoption in remote areas and low population density. (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.