An efficient and secure mutual authentication protocol in wireless body area network

INTRODUCTION: Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an emerging field which is gaining a lot of attention in healthcare sector. It facilitates remote monitoring by gathering health related data using wearable bio-sensors based on Internet of Things (IoT). This technological advancement would significantly improve the tracking of fitness, health care delivery, medical diagnostics, early disease prediction, and associated medical dealings of any individual. Several challenges persist in WBAN due to its openness and mobility. OBJECTIVES: The medical data is extremely sensitive and personal in nature therefore it must be protected at any cost while being communicated between nodes. Highly resource constrained tiny sized bio-sensors restrict the usage of energy seeking traditional cryptographic techniques and hence require lightweight schemes to be evolved to authenticate the sensor nodes for secure communication. METHODS: Proposed lightweight mutual authentication based key agreement scheme is dependent on XOR operations and irreversible cryptographic hash functions. Scheme generates a session key to validate a pair of legitimate sensor nodes. BAN logic is used for formal verification and automatic security verification tool Scyther is used for the analysis of security protocol. RESULTS: Proposed scheme lived up to expectation when tested using BAN logic and Scyther tool. The scheme is successfully tested on 15 security parameters which are identified after a careful literature survey whereas other peer works have testified no better than 67% of the total number of security parameters. The result indicates that the proposed scheme is lightweight as the communication cost and storage requirement of the scheme have outperformed rest of the 7 schemes during performance analysis. CONCLUSION: Hence the proposed scheme is lightweight and efficient which is robust against modern attacks and performs better in comparison of its peers. © 2023 Kumar et al.