Biblio

Mobile healthcare (mHealth) application and technologies have promised their cost-effectiveness to enhance healthcare quality, particularly in rural areas. However, the increased security incidents and leakage of patient data raise the concerns to address security risks and privacy issues of mhealth applications urgently. While recent mobile health applications that rely on password-based authentication cannot withstand password guessing and cracking attacks, several countermeasures such as One-Time Password (OTP), grid-based password, and biometric authentication have recently been implemented to protect mobile health applications. These countermeasures, however, can be thwarted by brute force attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks and persistent malware attacks. This paper proposed grid-based honey encryption by hybridising honey encryption with grid-based authentication. Compared to recent honey encryption limited in the hardening password attacks process, the proposed grid-based honey encryption can be further employed against shoulder surfing, smudge and replay attacks. Instead of rejecting access as a recent security defence mechanism in mobile healthcare applications, the proposed Grid-based Honey Encryption creates an indistinct counterfeit patient's record closely resembling the real patients' records in light of each off-base speculation legitimate password.

Cloud computing is a remarkable model for permitting on-demand network access to an elastic collection of configurable adaptive resources and features including storage, software, infrastructure, and platform. However, there are major concerns about security-related issues. A very critical security function is user authentication using passwords. Although many flaws have been discovered in password-based authentication, it remains the most convenient approach that people continue to utilize. Several schemes have been proposed to strengthen its effectiveness such as salted hashes, one-time password (OTP), single-sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). This study proposes a new authentication mechanism by combining user's password and modified characters of CAPTCHA to generate a passkey. The modification of the CAPTCHA depends on a secret agreed upon between the cloud provider and the user to employ different characters for some characters in the CAPTCHA. This scheme prevents various attacks including short-password attack, dictionary attack, keylogger, phishing, and social engineering. Moreover, it can resolve the issue of password guessing and the use of a single password for different cloud providers.