Secure and lightweight key agreement protocol for remote surgery over tactile internet using physically unclonable functions

In telemedicine, the tactile internet allows surgeons to perform surgeries using robotic systems and receive tactile feedback from remote patients. However, inappropriate safety measures can put patients at risk. Recently, many lightweight authentication schemes have been developed for remote surgery applications in the tactile internet environment. These schemes forthright encrypt messages using constant keys, and store secret keys in a verifier table, so they cannot resist potential attacks. To solve these problems, this study develops a lightweight authenticated key agreement scheme for 5G networks in the Tactile Internet environment using the lightweight Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). The security of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by using formal security proofs. The proposed scheme not only overcomes the shortcomings of previously developed schemes, but also has higher efficiency and satisfies more security requirements.