The Internet of Things (IoT) has been integrated into legacy healthcare systems for the purpose of improving healthcare processes. As one of the key technologies of IoT, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been applied to offer services like patient monitoring, drug administration, and medical asset tracking. However, people have concerns about the security and privacy of RFID-based healthcare systems, which require a proper solution. To solve the problem, recently in 2019, Fan et al. proposed a lightweight RFID authentication scheme in the IEEE Network. They claimed that their scheme can resist various attacks in RFID systems with low implementation cost, and thus is suitable for RFID-based healthcare systems. In this article, our contributions mainly consist of two parts. First, we analyze the security of Fan et al.'s scheme and find out its security vulnerabilities. Second, we propose a novel lightweight authentication scheme to overcome these security weaknesses. The security analysis shows that our scheme can satisfy the necessary security requirements. Besides, the performance evaluation demonstrates that our scheme is of low cost. Thus, our scheme is well-suited for practical RFID-based healthcare systems.
Keywords: authentication; healthcare systems; lightweight; radio frequency identification; security.