An efficient anonymous authentication and confidentiality preservation schemes for secure communications in wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is utilized in various healthcare applications due to its ability to provide suitable medical services by exchanging the biological data between the patient and doctor through a network of implantable or wearable medical sensors connected in the patients’ body. The collected data are communicated to the medical personals through open wireless channels. Nevertheless, due to the open wireless nature of communication channels, WBAN is susceptible to security attacks by malicious users. For that reason, secure anonymous authentication and confidentiality preservation schemes are essential in WBAN. Authentication and confidentiality play a significant role while transfers, medical images securely across the network. Since medical images contain highly sensitive information, those images should be transferred securely from the patients to the doctor and vice versa. The proposed anonymous authentication technique helps to ensure the legitimacy of the patient and doctors without disclosing their privacy. Even though various cryptographic encryption techniques such as AES and DES are available to provide confidentiality, the key size and the key sharing are the main problems to provide a worthy level of security. Hence, an efficient affine cipher-based encryption technique is proposed in this paper to offer a high level of confidentiality with smaller key size compared to existing encryption techniques. The security strength of the proposed work against various harmful security attacks is proven in security analysis section to ensure that it provides better security. The storage cost, communication cost and computational cost of the proposed scheme are demonstrated in the performance analysis section elaborately. In connection to this, the computational complexity of the proposed scheme is reduced around 29% compared to the existing scheme.