The telecare medical information systems (TMISs) enable patients to conveniently enjoy telecare services at home. The protection of patient’s privacy is a key issue due to the openness of communication environment. Authentication as a typical approach is adopted to guarantee confidential and authorized interaction between the patient and remote server. In order to achieve the goals, numerous remote authentication schemes based on cryptography have been presented. Recently, Arshad et al.(J Med Syst 38(12): 2014) presented a secure and efficient three-factor authenticated key exchange scheme to remedy the weaknesses of Tan et al.’s scheme (J Med Syst 38(3): 2014). In this paper, we found that once a successful off-line password attack that results in an adversary could impersonate any user of the system in Arshad et al.’s scheme. In order to thwart these security attacks, an enhanced biometric and smart card based remote authentication scheme for TMISs is proposed. In addition, the BAN logic is applied to demonstrate the completeness of the enhanced scheme. Security and performance analyses show that our enhanced scheme satisfies more security properties and less computational cost compared with previously proposed schemes.

Biometrics authenticated schemes using smart cards have attracted much attention in multi-server environments. Several schemes of this type where proposed in the past. However, many of them were found to have some design flaws. This paper concentrates on the security weaknesses of the three-factor authentication scheme by Mishra et al. After careful analysis, we find their scheme does not really resist replay attack while failing to provide an efficient password change phase. We further propose an improvement of Mishra et al.’s scheme with the purpose of preventing the security threats of their scheme. We demonstrate the proposed scheme is given to strong authentication against several attacks including attacks shown in the original scheme. In addition, we compare the performance and functionality with other multi-server authenticated key schemes.

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WSNs (Wireless sensor networks) are nowadays viewed as a vital portion of the IoTs (Internet of Things). Security is a significant issue in WSNs, especially in resource-constrained environments. AKA (Authentication and key agreement) enhances the security of WSNs against adversaries attempting to get sensitive sensor data. Various AKA schemes have been developed for verifying the legitimate users of a WSN. Firstly, we scrutinize Amin-Biswas’s currently scheme and demonstrate the major security loopholes in their works. Next, we propose a lightweight AKA scheme, using symmetric key cryptography based on smart card, which is resilient against all well known security attacks. Furthermore, we prove the scheme accomplishes mutual handshake and session key agreement property securely between the participates involved under BAN (Burrows, Abadi and Needham) logic. Moreover, formal security analysis and simulations are also conducted using AVISPA(Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) to show that our scheme is secure against active and passive attacks. Additionally, performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme is secure and efficient to apply for resource-constrained WSNs.

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