Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for WBANs with ECC Modification

Abstract

The Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) technique has become an important technology in the context of intelligent healthcare systems, owing its capabilities to the real-time collection and transmission of patients' physiological data with the help of wearable and implantable sensor devices. WBANs will facilitate continuous health monitoring by wearable and implanted sensors. WBANs are vulnerable to a range of security attacks such as impersonation attacks, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks and unauthorized access. For WBANs, authentication protocols are used for protecting access to real-time data from sensor nodes. But, they are limited in scope and susceptible to different security attacks.

To solve these problems, this paper proposes an authentication protocol for WBANs that is secure and light, and has been improved by adding Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) modification. To meet security requirements, the proposed protocol is a combination of anonymous authentication method and ECC key exchange method.

The protocol provides mutual authentication, confidentiality, integrity, anonymity, forward security and efficient computation by optimized ECC operations with lightweight hashing. The proposed ECC modified scheme is mathematically modeled, formally analyzed from security perspective, and evaluated using simulation techniques and results, which show good security performance with reasonable efficiency for the resource-constrained WBAN devices. Optimized ECC operations and lightweight hash functions are used during the authentication process to establish an efficient key generation and secure communication for resource-limited WBAN devices.

A mathematical model and formal security analysis prove that the proposed scheme is flexible to the main security attacks. In addition, performance evaluation results show that the proposed Modified ECC protocol has computational complexity and communication overhead is reduced, and it has high security. The results validate the proposed scheme, which has been proven to be secure and efficient enough for next generation applications of WBAN with a healthcare focus