An Improved Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

The wireless body area networks (WBANs) play a vital role in the state-of-the-art medical systems for remote monitoring and maintaining the health of patients. These WBANs collect the real-time health status of patients using intelligent sensors and submit to servers through internet for being utilized by the medical experts. This communication must be anonymous as well as secure from attackers for reliable dispensation of medical services. In recent years, many authentication protocols for WBAN could be witnessed. In this study, we demonstrate that one of the most recently presented WBAN-based authentication protocol is found to be prone to session-specific temporary information attack, key compromise impersonation as well as session key recovery attacks. Thereafter, we propose an efficient, secure and anonymous WBAN authenticated key agreement scheme addressing the identified concerns in previous scheme. In due course, we assess the performance of contributed scheme informally as well as formally with the use of ProVerif automated tool and random oracle model. The performance findings also indicate that our scheme not only achieves efficiency but offers robust and implementable security features.

Keywords

• Authentication
• wireless body area networks
• patient healthcare
• cryptography
• medical sensors