shahin: a secure hash-based authentication protocol for heterogeneous iomt-enabled networks

The internet of medical things (iomt) is revolutionizing healthcare by interconnecting medical devices, patients, and healthcare professionals into a comprehensive network. however, security concerns in resource-constrained iomt devices (wearable and implantable sensors) pose significant challenges. these devices are vulnerable to common attacks like eavesdropping, replay, insider, impersonation, man-in-the-middle (mitm), and ephemeral secret leakage attacks. mutual authentication and session key agreement between communicating entities offer a vital solution to counter these risks. this work addresses these vulnerabilities by proposing shahin, a secure, lightweight, and hash-based authentication protocol for heterogeneous iomt environments. shahin facilitates mutual authentication between users/gateways and sensing devices with the support of remote health servers. it achieves this while adhering to stringent security and performance evaluation criteria. shahin utilizes lightweight hash-based cryptographic operations to ensure efficient communication for resource-constrained devices. the proposed protocol s security is comprehensively evaluated using multiple approaches: informal analysis through expert knowledge, formal verification via the random oracle model (rom), and attack simulation using the avispa tool. the analyses demonstrate shahin s robust security posture. performance comparisons with existing schemes reveal that it achieves 5% to 98% reductions in communication overhead compared to prior work.