Search

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.

Objective: In this paper we investigate the security level of a comprehensive RFID solution to enhance inpatient medication safety, named IS-RFID, which has been recently proposed by Peris-Lopez et al., Method: We analyses the security of the protocol against the known attacks in the context. The main target of this paper is to determine whether the new protocol provides the confidentiality property, which is expected to be provided by such a protocol., Results: It was found that IS-RFID has critical weaknesses. The presented security investigations show that a passive adversary can retrieve secret parameters of patient's tag in cost of O(2(16)) off-line PRNG evaluations. Given the tag's secret parameters, any security claims are ruined., Conclusions: In this paper we presented an efficient passive secret disclosure attack which retrieves the main secret parameters related to the patient which shows that IS-RFID may put the patient safety on risk. The proposed attacking technique is in light of two vulnerabilities of the protocol: (1) the short length of the used PRNG, which is urged by the target technology, EPC C1 Gen2 ; (2) the message-generating mechanism utilizing PRNG was not carefully scrutinized. While the later point can be fixed by careful designing of the transferred messages between the protocol's party, the earlier point, i.e., the short length of the available PRNG for EPC C1 Gen2 tags, is a limitation which is forced by the technology. In addition, over the last years, schemes based solely on using simple operations or short PRNG (such as IS-RFID) have been shown to offer very low or no security at all. Recent advances in lightweight ciphers, such as PRESENT or Grain , seem a much more appropriate solution rather than relying on short PRNGs. However, such solutions breaks the EPC C1 Gen2 compatibility., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: The occurrence of a medication error can threaten patient safety. The medication administration process is complex and cumbersome, and nursing staffs are prone to error when they are tired. Proper Information Technology (IT) can assist the nurse in correct medication administration., Method: We review a recent proposal regarding a leading-edge solution to enhance inpatient medication safety by using RFID technology. The proof mechanism is the kernel concept in their design and worth studying to develop a well-designed grouping-proof scheme. Other RFID grouping-proof protocols could be similarly applied in administering physician orders. We improve on the weaknesses of previous works and develop a reading-order independent RFID grouping-proof scheme in this paper., Result: In our scheme, tags are queried and verified under the direct control of the authorized reader without connecting to the back-end database server. Immediate verification in our design makes this application more portable and efficient and critical security issues have been analyzed by the threat model., Conclusion: Our scheme is suitable for the safe drug administration scenario and the drug package scenario in a hospital environment to enhance inpatient medication safety. It automatically checks for correct drug unit-dose and appropriate inpatient treatments., (Copyright © 2013. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.)

Medication errors can cause substantial harm to patients. Automated patient medication system with RFID technology is purposely used to reduce the medication error, to improve the patient safety, to provide personalized patient medication and identification and also to provide counterfeit protection to the patients. In order to enhance medication safety for patients we propose a new dynamic ID based lightweight RFID authentication protocol. Due to low storage capacity and limited computational and communicational capacity of tags, only pseudo random number generator function, one way hash function and bitwise Xor operation are used in our authentication protocol. The proposed protocol is practical, secure and efficient for health care domain.

Several papers were proposed in which symmetric cryptography was used to design RFID grouping-proof for medication safety in the Journal of Medical Systems. However, if we want to ensure privacy, authentication and protection against the tracking of RFID-tags without losing system scalability, we must design an asymmetric cryptography-based RFID. This paper will propose a new ECC-based grouping-proof for RFID. Our ECC-based grouping-proof reduces the computation of tags and prevents timeout problems from occurring in n-party grouping-proof protocol. Based on asymmetric cryptography, the proposed scheme is practical, secure and efficient for medication applications.

The low birth rate has led to an aging society; the burgeoning number of elderly patients may affect the medical quality and result in negative medical incidents. There are many factors that lead to medical errors, such as similar medication names, erroneous labels and packaging, as well as staff shortages, fatigue and carelessness. Determining how to reduce medical errors has become an important issue. As RFID exhibits powerful identification characteristics, it can help nurses to quickly identify patients and their corresponding medicine. Currently, there are numerous practical applications for improving the efficiency of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems. In this paper, we use an RFID yoking proof mechanism which conforms to EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2 standards to improve patient safety and reduce medical errors. Our scheme can achieve different goals such as resist numerous known attacks, achieve mutual authentication, anonymity and non-repudiation. It also provides a practical medical care and offer higher quality of medical care. The pharmacist cannot deny that this prescription was confirmed for the patient and the nurse cannot also deny he or she dispensed this medicine to the patient for protecting the patients' interests.

Quite recently, Yu et al. presented a real lightweight binding proof protocol to guard patient safety and prevent medication errors. In this paper, we first show their protocol is still vulnerable to impersonation attacks. Thereafter we propose a new lightweight binding proof protocol to overcome these weaknesses and securely achieve the goal of proving that two tags exist in the field simultaneously.

An Institute of Medicine Report stated there are 98,000 people annually who die due to medication related errors in the United States, and hospitals and other medical institutions are thus being pressed to use technologies to reduce such errors. One approach is to provide a suitable protocol that can cooperate with low cost RFID tags in order to identify patients. However, existing low cost RFID tags lack computational power and it is almost impossible to equip them with security functions, such as keyed hash function. To address this issue, a so a real lightweight binding proof protocol is proposed in this paper. The proposed protocol uses only logic gates (e.g. AND, XOR, ADD) to achieve the goal of proving that two tags exist in the field simultaneously, without the need for any complicated security algorithms. In addition, various scenarios are provider to explain the process of adopting this binding proof protocol with regard to guarding patient safety and preventing medication errors.

Owing to the low cost and convenience of identifying an object without physical contact, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems provide innovative, promising and efficient applications in many domains. An RFID grouping protocol is a protocol that allows an off-line verifier to collect and verify the evidence of two or more tags simultaneously present. Recently, Huang and Ku (J. Med. Syst, 2009) proposed an efficient grouping protocol to enhance medication safety for inpatients based on low-cost tags. However, the Huang-Ku scheme is not secure; an attacker can easily make up fake grouping records to cheat the verifier. This weakness would seriously endanger the safety of inpatient medication safety. This paper will show the weaknesses, and then propose two RFID-based solutions to enhance medication safety for two different scenarios. The proposed schemes are practical, secure and efficient for medication applications.

In order to provide enhanced medication safety for inpatients, the medical mechanism which adopts the modified grouping proof protocol is proposed in this paper. By using the grouping proof protocol, the medical staffs could confirm the authentication and integrity of a group of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags which are embedded on inpatient bracelets and the containers of drugs. This mechanism is designed to be compatible with EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 standard which is the most popular specification of RFID tags. Due to the light-weight computational capacity of passive tags, only the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) and cyclic redundancy code (CRC) are allowed to be used in the communication protocol. Furthermore, a practical scenario of using this proposed mechanism in hospital to examine the medication safety is also presented.