Robust anonymous authentication protocol for health-care applications using wireless medical sensor networks

Abstract

With the fast development of wireless communication technologies and semiconductor technologies, the wireless sensor network (WSN) has been widely used in many applications. As an application of the WSN, the wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) could improve health-care quality and has become important in the modern medical system. In the WMSN, physiological data are collected by sensors deployed in the patient's body and sent to health professionals' mobile devices through wireless communication. Then health professionals could get the status of the patient anywhere and anytime. The data collected by sensors are very sensitive and important. The leakage of them could compromise the patient's privacy and their malicious modification could harm the patient's health. Therefore, both security and privacy are two important issues in WMSNs. Recently, Kumar et al. proposed an efficient authentication protocol for health-care applications using WMSNs and claimed that it could withstand various attacks. However, we find that their protocol is vulnerable to the off-line password guessing attack and the privileged insider attack. We also point out that their protocol cannot provide user anonymity. In this paper, we will propose a robust anonymous authentication protocol for health-care applications using WMSNs. Compared with Kumar et al.'s protocol, the proposed protocol has strong security and computational efficiency. Therefore, it is more suitable for health-care applications using WMSNs.