Lightweight Authentication Protocol Using Self-Certified Public Keys for Wireless Body Area Networks in Health-Care Applications

Abstract

Health-care centers have been meeting challenges due to the increase in the aging population and chronic diseases that need continuous medical monitoring. Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a non-invasive technology consisting of diverse connected bio-medical sensors placed in the human body, which measure physiological parameters and make the information accessible to health-care professionals ubiquitously. However, a major problem in WBAN is the security and privacy of the patient's medical information. An essential security method to protect the physiological data is authentication. Several authentication protocols have been proposed for WBANs; however, some require many computing resources, and some have security vulnerabilities. In this article, the Two-Party Lightweight Authentication Protocol (TLAP) for WBANs is proposed. It uses self-certified public keys based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), scalar point multiplication, symmetric key encryption, and the lightweight operations xor and conventional hash function to reduce the computational cost of the protocol. Formal and informal analyses were made to demonstrate that TLAP provides mutual authentication and resists potential attacks in WBANs. The security and performance of TLAP and similar existing protocols were analyzed and compared. The analyzes showed TLAP supports more security features and has lower execution time and communication cost than the other protocols, which is significant to decrease the energy consumption in WBANs.