An improved three factor authentication protocol for wireless body area networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is a concrete solution for the healthcare system, and it is paramount to ensure the sensed data by the WBAN sensors is secure against vulnerable threats and inaccessible by unauthorized entities. In light of this, highly robust authentication schemes and solutions are essential for the successful adoption of WBANs. To this end, a plethora of secure authentication solutions have been recommended by investigators over the past few decades. However, the absence of cohesive research work in view of secure mutual authentication schemes does not light on the extensive purpose of offering a bird’s-eye solution to the domain. To address the security issues in the previous schemes, we approach them in the following manner: We reviewed the Ali et al. scheme, a recently proposed authentication scheme for wireless medical sensor networks for healthcare monitoring, asserting that their scheme can withstand various attacks. Despite this, we proved that their scheme still has significant security weaknesses and is vulnerable to various attacks through rigorous cryptanalysis. Afterward, we proposed our three-factor authentication scheme to overcome the vulnerable attacks found in the Ali et al. scheme. Thereafter, we performed an extensive informal and formal analysis using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic to verify the robustness of the proposed scheme. From the analysis, we proved that the proposed authentication scheme is able to withstand various attacks on WBAN. Finally, a critical performance evaluation is done on our scheme. From the results, we identified that our scheme is a robust and identical solution for feature-rich WBAN health-care applications.