Efficient and privacy-preserving authentication scheme for wireless body area networks

Abstract As a significant part of electronic health, wireless body area networks (WBANs) have greatly improved the quality and efficiency of healthcare. With the help of WBANs, comprehensive and uninterrupted health monitoring becomes possible, and the user can enjoy the medical services provided by application providers with no limitations on space and time. Since the physiological data of user are transmitted on the public channels, it is essential to protect user’s privacy and ensure secure communications in WBANs. In the past few years, several authentication schemes were proposed to solve the security issues of transferring data in WBANs. However, most of these schemes are not efficient and secure enough. As a step towards this direction, in this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving authentication scheme for WBANs using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). In the proposed scheme, the method of certificateless authentication based on identity-based cryptography is adopted, which makes it suitable for multi-server architecture without online third party participation. Security analysis and comparisons with five related authentication schemes demonstrate that the proposed privacy-preserving authentication scheme can not only provide the desired security features, but also reduce the computation cost effectively.