Attacks and Solutions for a Two-Factor Authentication Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

As an extension of the 4G system, 5G is a new generation of broadband mobile communication with high speed, low latency, and large connection characteristics. It solves the problem of human-to-thing and thing-to-thing communication to meet the needs of intelligent medical devices, automotive networking, smart homes, industrial control, environmental monitoring, and other IoT application needs. This has resulted in new research topics related to wireless body area networks. However, such networks are still subject to significant security and privacy threats. Recently, Fotouhi et al. proposed a lightweight and secure two-factor authentication protocol for wireless body area networks in medical IoT. However, in this study, we demonstrate that their proposed protocol is still vulnerable to sensor-capture attacks and the lack of authentication between users and mobile devices. In addition, we propose a new protocol to overcome the limitations mentioned above. A detailed comparison shows that our proposed protocol is better than the previous protocols in terms of security and performance.