Enhanced Session Initiation Protocols for Emergency Healthcare Applications

TL;DR

This paper analyzes security flaws in existing SIP protocols for emergency healthcare, proposes an improved scheme that enhances security without added computational cost, and compares it with related schemes.

Contribution

It identifies security vulnerabilities in current SIP protocols and introduces a new, more secure version suitable for emergency medical applications.

Findings

Existing SIPs fail to protect user credentials under session exposure attacks.

The proposed scheme improves security without increasing computational overhead.

Comparative analysis shows enhanced security features over prior protocols.

Abstract

In medical emergencies, an instant and secure messaging is an important service to provide quality healthcare services. A session initiation protocol (SIP) is an IP-based multimedia and telephony communication protocol used to provide instant messaging services. Thus, design of secure and efficient SIP for quality medical services is an emerging problem. In this paper, we first explore the security limitations of the existing SIPs proposed by Sureshkumar et al. and Zhang et al. in the literature. Our analysis shows that most of the existing schemes fail to protect the user credentials when unexpectedly the session-specific ephemeral secrets revealed to an adversary by the session exposure attacks. We then present a possible improvement over Sureshkumar et al.'s scheme without increasing the computational cost. We compare the proposed improvement for computational overheads and security features with the various related existing schemes in the literature.