An Improved Authentication Protocol for Smart Healthcare System Using Wireless Medical Sensor Network

Abstract

With the rapid development and evolution of wireless network technology, electronic health has shown great potential in continuously monitoring the health of patients. The wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) has played an important role in this field. In WMSN, medical sensors are placed on patients to collect relevant health data and transmitted to medical professionals in hospitals or at home through insecure channels. These health data need to be highly protected because they contain patient-related private information. Once the information is leaked or maliciously modified, it will cause the wrong diagnosis and endanger the health of patients. To protect information privacy and security from being stolen by illegal users, this article reviews the solutions of Farash et al. and further points out the existing vulnerabilities, such as privileged insider attack, user anonymity invalidation, and offline password guessing attack. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we use the Elliptic Curve Cryptography to propose an improved anonymous authentication protocol for a smart healthcare system. The security of our protocol is verified by Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tools, and security features and efficiency analysis are performed with other related schemes. The results show that the improved protocol provides better security protection while ensuring computational and communication efficiency.

Keywords

• Authentication
• patient monitor
• security analysis
• wireless medical sensor network