An efficient and secure mutual authentication protocol in wireless body area network

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an emerging field which is gaining a lot of attention in healthcare sector. It facilitates remote monitoring by gathering health related data using wearable bio-sensors based on IOT. This technological advancement would significantly improve the tracking of fitness, health care delivery, medical diagnostics, early disease prediction, and associated medical dealings of any individual. Several challenges persist in WBAN due to its openness and mobility. The medical data is extremely sensitive and personal in nature therefore it must be protected at any cost while being communicated between nodes. Highly resource constrained tiny sized bio-sensors restrict the usage of energy seeking traditional cryptographic techniques and hence require new methods to be evolved to secure the communication. The current study proposes a lightweight mutual authentication based key agreement scheme which is dependent on XOR operations and cryptographic hash functions. BAN logic is used for formal verification and automatic security verification tool Scyther is used for the analysis of security protocol. Proposed scheme is compared with other related works on 15 key security parameters which are identified on the basis of literature survey. The results indicate that the proposed scheme follows all the security parameters and performs better in terms of computation cost, energy consumption, communication cost and storage requirement as compared with other schemes.