An Efficient Mutual Authentication and Access Control Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks in Healthcare

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will play an active role in the 21th Century Healthcare IT to reduce the healthcare cost and improve the quality of care. The protection of data confidentiality and patient privacy are the most critical requirements for the ubiquitous use of WSNs in healthcare environments. This requires a secure and lightweight user authentication and access control. Symmetric key - based access control is not suitable for WSNs in healthcare due to dynamic network topology, mobility, and stringent resource constraints. In this paper, we propose a secure, lightweight public key - based security scheme, Mutual Authentication and Access Control based on Elliptic curve cryptography (MAACE). MAACE is a mutual authentication protocol where a healthcare professional can authenticate to an accessed node (a PDA or medical sensor) and vice versa. This is to ensure that medical data is not exposed to an unauthorized person. On the other hand, it ensures that medical data sent to healthcare professionals did not originate from a malicious node. MAACE is more scalable and requires less memory compared to symmetric key-based schemes. Furthermore, it is much more lightweight than other public key-based schemes. Security analysis and performance evaluation results are presented and compared to existing schemes to show advantages of the proposed scheme.