A Low Overhead and Scalable Authentication and Encryption Scheme for Medical Wireless Sensor Networks

This study discusses an integrated authentication and encryption (LoSWIAE) scheme for medical wireless sensor networks (MWSNs). A scalable watermarking-based solution promises amalgamated advantages offered by both encryption and authentication schemes in MWSNs but at much lower costs. Furthermore, unlike encryption, the proposed scheme does not require an encryption-decryption key to be exchanged before communication. LoSWIAE ensures nonrepudiation, confidentiality, and protection against eavesdropping in addition to node and data authentication. The scheme's strength lies in the node's geographical credentials, temporal credentials of the message, and basic information captured by the sensor node. Parameters used to check the scheme's robustness are cracking probability and communication overhead. Analytical results obtained compared to an earlier scheme show the effectiveness of LoSWIAE. It proves to have better efficiency and an improvement of the order of 1,032 at the cost of infinitesimal communication overhead.