Efficient and Provably Secure Anonymous User Authentication Scheme for Patient Monitoring Using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) are playing an increasingly important role in smart healthcare applications. Since the data transmitted in WMSNs is closely related to patient's life and health, and considering the resource-constrain feature of the sensor node, constructing an authentication scheme for WMSNs is a formidable task. Recently, Soni et al. presented an elliptic curve cryptosystem based three-factor authentication scheme for WMSNs. However, we discover that their scheme suffers from serious vulnerabilities, such as sensor node capture attack, no forward secrecy, and the violation of three-factor security. To enhance the security and efficiency, we present a novel scheme using Rabin cryptosystem and chaotic maps. We use several widely-accepted security analysis methods to verify the correctness and security of our scheme. The Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic proof confirms the completeness of our scheme. The heuristic analysis indicates that our scheme is resistant to potential attacks and provides various security attributes like forward secrecy and three-factor security. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model. Finally, the performance comparisons indicate that our scheme is superior to the related schemes both in security and efficiency and is more applicable to WMSNs owing to low overhead of the sensor node.

Keywords

• Internet of Things
• wireless medical sensor networks
• authentication
• user anonymity
• random oracle model