Abstract
Medication errors are very dangerous even fatal since it could cause serious even fatal harm to patients. In order to reduce medication errors, automated patient medication systems using the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology have been used in many hospitals. The data transmitted in those medication systems is very important and sensitive. In the past decade, many security protocols have been proposed to ensure its secure transition attracted wide attention. Due to providing mutual authentication between the medication server and the tag, the RFID authentication protocol is considered as the most important security protocols in those systems. In this paper, we propose a RFID authentication protocol to enhance patient medication safety using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The analysis shows the proposed protocol could overcome security weaknesses in previous protocols and has better performance. Therefore, the proposed protocol is very suitable for automated patient medication systems.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Prof. Jesse Ehrenfeld and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51190093, 51309098, 200926) and the Ministry of Water Resources Public Welfare Special Industry Research (No. 201301039).
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The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Patient Facing Systems
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Zhang, Z., Qi, Q. An Efficient RFID Authentication Protocol to Enhance Patient Medication Safety Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography. J Med Syst 38, 47 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-014-0047-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-014-0047-8