New Paper: Online at Will: A Novel Protocol for Mutual Authentication in Peer-to-Peer Networks for Patient-Centered Health Care Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel, simple, and secure mutual authentication protocol that supports offline access, leverages independent and stateless encryption services, and enables patients and medical professionals to establish secure connections when using patient-centered health care information systems (PHSs) on peer-to-peer (P2P)–eg, decentralized personal health records or interoperable Covid-19 proximity trackers. Our protocol includes a virtual smart card (software-based) feature to ease integration of authentication features of emerging national health-IT infrastructures. 

The security evaluation shows that our protocol resists most online and offline threats while exhibiting performance comparable to traditional, albeit less secure, password-based authentication methods. Our protocol serves as foundation for the design and implementation of P2P PHSs that will make use of P2P PHSs more secure and trustworthy.

This work will be presented at the 54th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS-54), January 5-8, 2021, Hawaii, USA. 

This is the link to the pre-copyedited, author-produced version of the manuscript: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/34467182