A Lightweight and Secure Mutual Authentication Scheme for Smart Healthcare Systems in Cloud Environments

ABSTRACT In the era of digital healthcare systems and cloud computing, securing the transmission and storage of sensitive medical data has become increasingly critical. Existing authentication protocols in cloud‐based environments often suffer from significant limitations, such as high computational costs, vulnerability to insider or impersonation attacks, and insufficient guarantees of anonymity, traceability, and mutual authentication. In this work, we propose a lightweight and robust authentication scheme tailored for smart healthcare systems leveraging elliptic curve cryptography and secure hash functions. Our method ensures mutual authentication, anonymity, perfect forward secrecy, and strong resistance against various attack vectors including man‐in‐the‐middle, replay, and insider attacks. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our scheme outperforms existing approaches in terms of storage, communication, and computation efficiency, making it a promising solution for securing cloud‐based healthcare infrastructures.