An Efficient, Hybrid Authentication Using ECG and Lightweight Cryptographic Scheme for WBAN

Abstract

The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) plays a pivotal role in providing ubiquitous computing and has applications in different fields, especially in health monitoring. The advancement in wearable devices has revolutionized the concept of medical services and brought ease to our daily lives. However, the latent threat imposed by attackers has increased concerns related to the security and privacy of patient’s data due to the open nature of the wireless network. The authentication schemes are used to secure patient’s critical data from different types of cyber-attacks. In this paper, we extend our previous work by presenting an anonymous, hybrid authentication scheme that utilized physiological signals in combination with a lightweight cryptographic method to provide robust security against well-known attacks especially key escrow, base station compromise, and untraceability of sessions. The broadly accepted BAN logic is utilized to offer formal proof of mutual authentication and key agreement. The informal verification is performed by the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocol and Applications (AVISPA) tool. Furthermore, the comparative analysis of the proposed scheme with peer work highlighted that it accomplished better security at low computational, communicational, energy consumption, and storage overheads.

Keywords

• Authentication scheme
• lightweight cryptography
• cyber-attacks
• key agreement
• sensors
• security