Abstract
A wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) can sense humans’ physiological signs without sacrificing patient comfort and transmit patient vital signs to health professionals’ hand-held devices. The patient physiological data are highly sensitive and WMSNs are extremely vulnerable to many attacks. Therefore, it must be ensured that patients’ medical signs are not exposed to unauthorized users. Consequently, strong user authentication is the main concern for the success and large scale deployment of WMSNs. In this regard, this paper presents an efficient, strong authentication protocol, named E-SAP, for healthcare application using WMSNs. The proposed E-SAP includes: (1) a two-factor (i.e., password and smartcard) professional authentication; (2) mutual authentication between the professional and the medical sensor; (3) symmetric encryption/decryption for providing message confidentiality; (4) establishment of a secure session key at the end of authentication; and (5) professionals can change their password. Further, the proposed protocol requires three message exchanges between the professional, medical sensor node and gateway node, and achieves efficiency (i.e., low computation and communication cost). Through the formal analysis, security analysis and performance analysis, we demonstrate that E-SAP is more secure against many practical attacks, and allows a tradeoff between the security and the performance cost for healthcare application using WMSNs.
Highlights
During the last few years, we have seen the great emergence of wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) in the healthcare industry
That poses a question to researchers, how to protect medical sensor data from illegal users?
In order to solve the above questions, this paper proposed efficient-strong authentication protocol (E-SAP), an efficient-strong user authentication protocol for healthcare application using wireless medical sensor networks
Summary
During the last few years, we have seen the great emergence of wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) in the healthcare industry. Many significant researches have been proposed for healthcare using sensor networks and provide sufficient security, such as data confidentiality, authentication, integrity and preserving patient privacy [31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39] These schemes do not considere strong user authentication, and lack a security mechanism, according to the HIPAA laws [29,30]. We discuss: (1) the healthcare architecture and major security requirements for healthcare application using wireless medical sensor networks; and (2) propose an efficient-strong authentication protocol, named E-SAP, for healthcare applications using WMSNs. The proposed scheme uses two-factor (i.e., password and smartcard) user authentication, where each user must prove their authenticity first and access the patient vital signs. We present healthcare monitoring architecture for hospital environments, adversary attack models and security requirements for healthcare application using WMSNs
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