Efficient authenticated key exchange protocols for wireless body area networks

Abstract

Secure protocol is a vital guarantee in all kinds of communication network environment. Designing on authenticated key exchange protocols is a hotspot in the field of information security at present, and the related theories have been increasingly mature. However, there is still scarcely any appropriate security protocol to guarantee the communication security of wireless body area networks (WBANs). In this paper, according to the standards on WBAN, we define a layered network model in accordance with the definition of two-hop star network topology firstly. In line with this model, we put forward two new authenticated key exchange protocols based on symmetric cryptosystem, which are suitable for WBAN application scenario. The proposed protocols support the selective authentication between nodes in WBAN. Simultaneously, two pairs of session key are generated efficiently and succinctly in each certification process. Finally, after security analyzing and performance evaluating demonstrate that the proposed key agreement protocols are proved to meet desired security properties with light computation and communication overhead. The proposed protocols provide a primitive to develop efficient and secure WBAN systems.