Efficient and Secure Key Management and Authentication Scheme for WBSNs Using CP-ABE and Consortium Blockchain

Abstract

Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) pose significant security and privacy risks. The Medical Server (MS) will only allow legitimate stakeholders access to confidential patient medical records when successful mutual authentication between all registered users and the MS has been confirmed using preset secret attributes. This paper proposes a novel approach to overcome the security and privacy problems in WBSNs by using CP-ABE and a consortium blockchain for key management and authentication. In this paper, a fixed-size session key is computed by utilizing several attribute base rules and AND/OR logic gate combinations. IEEE 802.15.6 is also used to transmit the encoded patient data from the register and legitimately deployed biosensor nodes on a patient’s body to the Base Station nearby (BS). This was done in part by leveraging consortium blockchains to construct partial blocks and then, transmit the encrypted partial blocks to MS via peer-to-peer networks, as well as aggregating critical physiological information. MS is now validating partial blocks with a hash function to ensure their integrity before converting them all into full blocks, which are subsequently mined and put on the blockchain effectively and ideally using a consensus mechanism. When sessions between MS and stakeholders are established, all legitimate consumers can view the secure medical records of a registered patient in a hospital using their predefined access structure.. The resource-constrained environment of WBSNs can benefit from enhanced data security and privacy by using CP-ABE in conjunction with the organization’s consensus to encrypt the patient’s critical features or attributes. Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocol and Applications (AVISPA) tool is used to verify the validity and correctness of the proposed authentication mechanism. The proposed scheme reduces transmission, processing and storage costs and energy usage by a significant margin when compared to current state-of-the-art alternatives. It is also worth noting that a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) approach known as Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) is employed to provide the ranking and determine which strategy is optimal across all of the domains involved.