A Secure and Efficient Authentication Scheme with Privacy Protection for Internet of Medical Things.

The Internet of Medical Things represents a pivotal application of Internet of Things technology in Healthcare 4.0, offering substantial practical benefits in enhancing medical quality, reducing costs, and minimizing errors. In history, researchers have proposed numerous privacy-preserving authentication schemes to safeguard Internet of Medical Things applications. Nevertheless, due to design shortcomings, existing solutions still encounter significant security and performance challenges, rendering them impractical for real-world use. To resolve the issue, this work introduces a novel practical Internet of Medical Things-based smart healthcare system, leveraging a pairing-free certificateless signature scheme and hash-based message authentication code. Through formal security proofs under standard cryptographic assumptions, and performance analysis, our scheme demonstrates enhanced security while maintaining desirable computational and communication efficiency.