Security-Enhanced Data Transmission Scheme for IoT-Based Healthcare in Remote Areas

In remote areas without continuous internet connectivity, patients often need to travel long distances to access healthcare services. Ensuring secure and efficient healthcare in remote areas has become a significant challenge. Inspired by delay tolerant networks and identity authentication protocols, we propose a security-enhanced data transmission scheme for healthcare in remote areas. The scheme leverages vehicles as data mules to address network intermittency, transporting data collected by wearable devices from remote areas to urban centers. It incorporates a novel key agreement mechanism based on Chebyshev polynomials and hash functions to protect patient privacy, along with a dynamic update method for pseudonyms and credentials to achieve lightweight anonymous authentication. Finally, we rigorously verify the security of the scheme using the Real-or-Random (ROR) model and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods in terms of performance.