An Efficient Authentication Protocol for Robust Security in Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

The ever increasing number of aging populace together with high number of chronic diseases has led to wide adoption of medical Internet of Things (IoT), such as Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). Through these networks, physiological data such as blood glucose, body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate are collected and transmitted to remote medical professionals for analysis, diagnosis and treatment. However, the deployed open wireless channels and IEEE 802.15.6 standardized protocol have vulnerabilities that can easily compromise the patient data. Although many security solutions have been presented based on techniques such as certificates and bilinear-pairings, these algorithms have either high overheads or still have numerous security gaps. In this paper, a lightweight encryption protocol is presented. It is shown to incur the least computation costs and average communication overheads. In addition, it offers anonymity, untraceability, authentication, session key agreement, perfect key secrecy, revocability and conditional privacy. Moreover, it protects against node capture, session hijacking, denial of sleep, denial of service, key compromise, side-channeling, impersonation, eavesdropping, session key disclosure, privileged insider, tracking, offline guessing, forgery and non-repudiation.