A Secure Multi-factor Authentication Protocol for Healthcare Services Using Cloud-based SDN

Cloud-based SDN (Software Defined Network) integration offers new kinds of agility, flexibility, automation, and speed in the network. Enter-prises and Cloud providers both leverage the benefits as networks can be con-figured and optimized based on the application requirement. The integration of cloud and SDN paradigms has played an indispensable role in improving ubiquitous health care services. It has improved the real-time monitoring of patients by medical practitioners. Patients' data get stored at the central server on the cloud from where it is available to medical practitioners in no time. The centralisation of data on the server makes it more vulnerable to malicious attacks and causes a major threat to patients' privacy. In recent days, several schemes have been proposed to ensure the safety of patients' data. But most of the techniques still lack the practical implementation and safety of data. In this paper, a secure multi-factor authentication protocol using a hash function has been proposed. BAN (Body Area Network) logic has been used to formally analyse the proposed scheme and ensure that no unauthenticated user can steal sensitivepatient information. Security Protocol Animator (SPAN)-Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool has been used for simulation. The results prove that the proposed scheme ensures secure access to the database in terms of spoofing and identification. Performance comparisons of the proposed scheme with other related historical schemes regarding time complexity, computation cost which accounts to only 423 ms in proposed, and security parameters such as identification and spoofing prove its efficiency.