This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile Systems

Abstract The telecare medical information systems (TMISs) enable patients to conveniently enjoy telecare ser-vices at home. The protection of patient’s privacy is a key issue due to the openness of communication environment. Authentication as a typical approach is adopted to guarantee confidential and authorized interaction between the patient and remote server. In order to achieve the goals, numerous remote authentication schemes based on cryptography have been presented. Recently, Arshad et al.(J Med Syst 38(12): 2014) presented a secure and efficient three-factor authen-ticated key exchange scheme to remedy the weaknesses of Tan et al.’s scheme (J Med Syst 38(3): 2014). In this paper, we found that once a successful off-line password attack that results in an adversary could impersonate any user of the system in Arshad et al.’s scheme. In order to thwart these security attacks, an enhanced biometric and smart card based remote authentication scheme for TMISs is pro-posed. In addition, the BAN logic is applied to demonstrate the completeness of the enhanced scheme. Security and performance analyses show that our enhanced scheme sat