Securing the Internet of Health Things with Certificateless Anonymous Authentication Scheme

What is it about?

This work proposes a certificateless anonymous authentication (CAA) scheme to enhance the security of the Internet of Health Things (IoHT), a critical subset of IoT that integrates biomedical devices and healthcare monitoring systems. IoHT environments are highly vulnerable to cyberattacks due to resource-constrained devices and insecure wireless communication channels. The proposed scheme is based on hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC), which enables stronger security with significantly reduced key sizes compared to traditional elliptic curve approaches. The design eliminates the need for certificates while preserving user anonymity, thereby reducing computational overhead and improving scalability in healthcare environments. Formal security analysis is conducted using the Real-or-Random (ROR) model, complemented by informal analysis to demonstrate resistance against common attacks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme achieves a computation cost of 2.88 ms and a communication cost of 1440 bits, outperforming comparable existing methods. Comparative analysis further confirms that the proposed approach provides a strong balance between security and efficiency, making it suitable for deployment in resource-constrained IoHT systems. The results highlight its potential to strengthen secure data exchange in next-generation healthcare applications while maintaining low operational cost.

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