IAR-AKA: An Efficient Authentication Scheme for Healthcare Tactile Internet Beyond Conventional Security
Xin Yang, Yimin Guo · IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2025
With the rapid advancement of 5G technology, the tactile Internet is emerging as a novel paradigm of interaction, particularly in fields like healthcare, where stringent demands for real-time and precise performance are prevalent. During the transmission and storage of medical data, malicious adversaries may attempt to compromise sensitive patient information or even disrupt the normal operation of medical devices, posing a threat to patient safety. Many existing authentication schemes claim and prove to resist various known attacks. However, subsequent research has uncovered security vulnerabilities in these schemes, primarily due to their oversight of implicit attacks, which stem from different combinations or inferences of known attacks. In this context, the design of a lightweight authentication scheme that is secure against implicit attacks becomes crucial. This paper proposes IAR-AKA, an authentication scheme for the healthcare tactile Internet environment that surpasses conventional security. We conduct formal security proofs based on session key security and its corresponding implicit attacks, and also perform non-formal security analysis based on the relationship between implicit attacks and security goals. The output of AVISPA tool indicates IAR-AKA is secure. Furthermore, detailed performance analysis results indicate that IAR-AKA not only possesses more security attributes against implicit attacks compared to similar solutions in comparable contexts but also exhibits lower communication and computation costs.