Privacy-Preserving and Hardware Acceleration-Based Authentication Scheme for Data Collection in E-Health Applications.

E-health applications have a variety of solutions that employ digital technology in healthcare to enhance how medical treatment is delivered. E-health applications should use a privacy-aware authentication approach for data collection to ensure the security and privacy of patients' data. Lightweight cryptographic solutions are required to authenticate data sources while incurring low computation and communication overheads. This paper introduces a privacy-preserving authentication approach for validating each data source before accepting its data. Our proposed cryptographic scheme authenticates the data source without revealing sensitive identity information. Because of the vast volume of data sources in E-health applications (patient, doctor, nurse, hospital, etc.), a hardware-accelerated authentication mechanism is a suitable option. Our proposed authentication method is implemented using VHDL and three field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with different capabilities to show the hardware utilization of our scheme. Also, we provided two different security levels by using two different key sizes to provide the tradeoff between security and hardware costs. The simulation result shows that our proposed scheme consumes 0.091 mW and has a latency of 98 ms with a data source identification (ID) size of 64 bits and a key length of 8192 bits. Also, the implementation is tested using an ID size of 128 bits and a key length of 32,768 bits.