Blockchain and Physically Unclonable Functions Based Mutual Authentication Protocol in Remote Surgery within Tactile Internet Environment

The Tactile Internet technology is considered as the evolution of the internet of things. It will enable real time applications in all fields like remote surgery. It requires extra low latency which must not exceed 1ms, high availability, reliability and strong security system. Since it appearance in 2014, tremendous efforts have been made to ensure authentication between sensors, actuators and servers to secure many applications such as remote surgery. This human to machine relationship is very critical due to its dependence of the human live, the communication between the surgeon who performs the remote surgery and the robot arms, as a tactile internet actor, should be fully and end to end protected during the surgery. Thus, a secure mutual user authentication framework has to be implemented in order to ensure security without influencing latency. The existing methods of authentication require server to stock and exchange data between the tactile internet entities, which does not only make the proposed systems vulnerables to the SPOF (Single Point of Failure), but also impact negatively on the latency time. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol for remote surgery in a Tactile Internet environment, which is composed of a decentralized blockchain and physically unclonable functions. Finally, performances evaluation illustrate that our proposed solution ensures security, latency and reliability.