Privacy preserving authentication protocol with optimized Elliptic Curve Cryptography for healthcare domain in cloud

With the emerge of cloud-based healthcare services, securing patient data is essential and the efficient authentication mechanisms has become a critical challenge. Traditional authentication protocols have the challenges with unauthorized access, identity theft, privacy breaches, and computational complexities that complicate the security of sensitive medical records. To overcome the challenges, this research introduces a novel authentication protocol based on Improved-Elliptic Curve Cryptography (Im-ECC) for the healthcare domain. The proposed Im-ECC algorithm enhances conventional modified ECC by integrating the Adaptive Secretary Bird Optimization (AdSB) algorithm for optimal key selection. Also, the authentication protocol is designed with three phases: registration, login, and authentication that provides the secure data access and sharing within healthcare cloud environments. The consideration of Im-ECC with AdSB-based key selection, the proposed authentication scheme significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining high security and scalability for resource-constrained healthcare systems.