# FPGA Implementation of Mutual Authentication Protocol for Medication Security System
## 1 Introduction  
The Internet of things (IoT) as an emerging network paradigm has been broadly applied in our daily life along with the development of wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies [1, 2]. WSNs have been subject to a great deal of research over recent years, driven by their potential to embed into the physical environment and observe and act on certain phenomena. Distinct characteristics arising from strict energy constraints, large numbers of nodes, and highly asymmetric data flows pose technical challenges for large-scale and long-term deployments. In 1978, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was the first pioneer that organized the Distributed Sensor Nets Workshop, focusing on wireless sensor networks research challenges such as networking technologies, signal processing techniques, and distributed algorithms [3]. This led to the beginning of the worldwide research boom on WSNs technology. The integration of WSN applications and low-power sensing nodes with the Internet has been accomplished with various approaches and strategies [4, 5].  
WSNs have an autonomous and ubiquitous nature; the use of wireless sensor networks has emerged in numerous domains such as defense, agriculture, transportation, and healthcare. Wireless sensor networks for IoT-based healthcare systems have facilitated the next generation of the connected healthcare industry, thereby causing drift from the traditional approaches to revolutionized technological approaches [6]. The data collected in most applications are valuable and need to maintain security. However, it becomes very challenging to implement user authentication in WSN applications because of the limited resources available in sensor nodes.  
The security protocols proposed for traditional WSNs are not directly appropriate for wireless medical sensor networks [7]. The main security concerns in medication security system architectures are to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of the commands issued by the medical requirement through the network system. Moreover, protocols that use complicated and computationally expensive cryptography may exhaust system resources (data/energy storage and communication range/bandwidth) [8; 9]. For instance, processing and storing the cryptography data complicates the system design. The medication security system has unique and challenging operational and security requirements, particularly the development of lightweight authentication and low computational power. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have recently become extremely popular due to their rapid prototyping, easy debugging, and reconfigurability characteristics. FPGAs have lower latency, low power consumption, and low-cost advantages, which makes them suitable for real-time applications such as automotive, health, and industrial applications. FPGAs are also well-suited to low-cost applications in which security and reliability are critical. In this work, a user authentication scheme is proposed and an FPGA is implemented to suit the infrastructure of a healthcare information system.  
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a background review; Section 3 explains the authentication scheme of the system; Section 4 shows the design and implementation results; Section 5 concludes the paper.