Cryptanalysis of Several Authentication Schemes for Healthcare Applications Using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are being applied in different fields. One of those fields is the body sensor networks. Body sensor networks is a kind of wireless sensor network with higher flexibility and sensitivity because the sensors are put on or in user's body. As healthcare applications includes confidential information, security becomes one of the most important aspects to consider. As a contribution to this field, Kumar et al. proposed an efficient-strong authentication protocol for healthcare application using wireless medical sensor networks in 2012. Later, Khan and Kumari presented their research work where they identified vulnerabilities in Kumar et al.'s work and proposed their own authentication scheme based on the two-factor user authentication concept. Additionally, Shin et al. also proposed a secure authentication mechanism. However, this paper finds that previous works are flawed with a number of security pitfalls. This paper cryptanalyzes the aforementioned works and shows how those works are vulnerable to data leakage, man in the middle attack, password guessing attack, replay attack, and manages insecure keys.