Proposing and verifying a security-enhanced protocol for IoT-based communication for medical devices

Internet of things technology has recently drawn much attention across industries. IoT technology has gradually been applied to industries and everyday life in general including healthcare, where people can access hospital information systems to view personal health and medical information. Still, due to security vulnerabilities, personal health and medical information is prone to hacking attacks. Thus, concerns over privacy invasion have come to the fore, and at the same time security issues are considered to override information services. This paper proposes a communication protocol based on hash lock, session keys, random numbers and security keys designed to be safe against intruders' hacking attempts in information communication between medical devices. Instead of arguing for the safety of the proposed protocol with mathematical theorem proving as in prior research on protocol proving, this paper verifies the safety of the proposed authentication protocol against a range of attacks using a model checking program, Casper/FDR program. In brief, the proposed communication protocol for medical devices is safe and secure against diverse attacks.