A Robust Biometric-Based Authentication Scheme for Wireless Body Area Network Using Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem

With the rapid growth of wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) based healthcare applications, protecting both the privacy and security from illegitimate users, are major concern issues since patient’s precise information is vital for the proper diagnosis procedure. So, authentication protocol is one of the efficient mechanisms to deal with trustworthy and authentic users. Several authentication protocols have been proposed in WMSNs environment. However, the most of these protocols are so susceptible to security threats and not suitable for practical use. In this article, recently proposed Amin et al.’s authentication scheme is reviewed and some vulnerabilities like off-line password guessing attack, user impersonation attack, known session-key temporary information attack, the revelation of secret parameters, and identity guessing attack are pointed out. To overcome all the above mentioned vulnerabilities, we have proposed an enhanced three-factor based remote user authentication protocol in WMSNs environment. Further, the proposed protocol is validated using Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic and then simulated using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. Moreover, the security analysis ensures that the proposed protocol is well protected from various types of malicious attacks. In addition, the performance evaluation shows better efficiency and suitability of our protocol over other related protocols.

Biosensor is a means to transmit some physical phenomena, like body temperature, pulse, respiratory rate, electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), and blood pressure. Such transmission is performed via Wireless Medical Sensor Network (WMSN) while diagnosing patients remotely through Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT). The sensitive data transmitted through WMSN from IoMT over an insecure channel is vulnerable to several threats and needs proper attention to be secured from adversaries. In contrast to addressing the security of all associated entities involving patient monitoring in the healthcare system or ensuring the integrity, authorization, and nonrepudiation of information over the communication line, no one can guarantee its security without a robust authentication protocol. Therefore, we have proposed a lightweight and robust authentication scheme for the network-enabled healthcare devices (IoMT) that mitigate all the identified weaknesses posed in the recent literature. The proposed protocol's security has been analyzed formally using BAN logic and ProVerif2.02 and informally using pragmatic illustration. Simultaneously, at the end of the paper, the performance analysis result shows a delicate balance of security with performance that is often missing in the current protocols.

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) are used in remote medical service environments to provide patients with convenient healthcare services. In a WMSN environment, patients wear a device that collects their health information and transmits the information via a gateway. Then, doctors make a diagnosis regarding the patient, utilizing the health information. However, this information can be vulnerable to various security attacks because the information is exchanged via an insecure channel. Therefore, a secure authentication scheme is necessary for WMSNs. In 2021, Masud et al. proposed a lightweight and anonymity-preserving user authentication scheme for healthcare environments. We discover that Masud et al.’s scheme is insecure against offline password guessing, user impersonation, and privileged insider attacks. Furthermore, we find that Masud et al.’s scheme cannot ensure user anonymity. To address the security vulnerabilities of Masud et al.’s scheme, we propose a three-factor-based mutual authentication scheme with a physical unclonable function (PUF). The proposed scheme is secure against various security attacks and provides anonymity, perfect forward secrecy, and mutual authentication utilizing biometrics and PUF. To prove the security features of our scheme, we analyze the scheme using informal analysis, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, the Real-or-Random (RoR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. Furthermore, we estimate our scheme’s security features, computation costs, communication costs, and energy consumption compared with the other related schemes. Consequently, we demonstrate that our scheme is suitable for WMSNs.

In wireless medical sensor networks (WMSN), a group of nodes to collect a patient's bio-data has revolutionized the existing medical paradigm, allowing medical professionals to access the patient’s record remotely and timely. However, the use of public communication channels and a centralized server to store the vital information of all the patients incurs greater risk to the patient’s privacy and also weakens the framework due to one centralized point of failure. Numerous researchers have proposed secure key agreement and authentication protocols but most of these protocols fail to withstand physical level attacks or they tend to incur added computation costs and increased number of bits being transmitted over the communication channel. IoT devices being resource-constrained need a lightweight and robust security mechanism without draining their already limited resources. To overcome these issues, in this paper, the proposed scheme integrates blockchain and the PUF-assisted approach for WMSN. The proposed approach makes use of PUF and the challenge-response pair generated via it to produce a secure and unclonable session key without the need to store any public keys. The comparison study done later in the paper provides a comparison on the basis of number of bits being transmitted and number of hash functions being used, between the existing protocols and the proposed one. In the end, the formal security analysis done using the Scyther tool indicates the efficiency and reliability of the proposed scheme.

A secure light weight scheme for user authentication and key agreement in multi-gateway based wireless sensor networks

Authentication and key agreement (AKA) provides flexible and convenient sercices. Most traditional AKA protocols are designed to apply in single-server environment, where a user has to register at different servers to access different types of network services and the user have to remember or manage a large number of usernames and passwords. Later, multi-server AKA protocols resolve the repeated registration problem of single-server AKA protocols, where a user can access different servers to get different services using a single registration and the same username and password. Recently, in 2015, Lu et al proposed a light-weight ID based authentication and key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture, referred to as LAKA protocol. They claimed their protocol can overcome all shortcomings which existed in Xue et al’s protocol. Unfortunately, our further research shows that LAKA protocol still suffers from server spoofing attack, stolen smart card attack etc. To overcome the weakness of LAKA protocol, an energy-efficient and lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol for multi-server architecture is proposed (abbreviated to ELAKA). The ELAKA protocol not only provides the security features declared by LAKA protocol, but also has some other advantages. First, the ELAKA protocol can realize authentication and key agreement just by three handshakes with extremely low communication cost and computation cost between users and servers, which can achieve a delicate balance of security and performance. Second, ELAKA protocol can enable the user enjoy the remote services with privacy protection. Finally the ELAKA protocol is proved secure against known possible attacks by using BAN logic. As a result, these features make ELAKA protocol is very suitable for computation-limited mobile devices (such as smartphone, PAD, tablets) in comparison to other related existing protocols.

The wireless medical sensor networks WMSN play a crucial role in healthcare monitoring remotely. In remote healthcare monitoring, the sensor nodes are deployed in patient's body for collecting physiological data and transmit these data over an insecure channel. The patient's health information is highly sensitive and important. Any malicious modification in physiological data will make wrong diagnoses and harm the patient health. Therefore, privacy, data security, and user authentication are extremely important for accessing patient's real-time heath information over an insecure channel. In this regard, this article proposes a secure and robust two-factor based remote user authentication protocol for healthcare monitoring. The authentication proof has done with the help of BAN logic, which ensures that the proposed scheme provides mutual authentication and session key agreement securely. The informal security verification proves that the developed protocol is secure from various security attacks. The simulation of the proposed scheme has been done using AVISPA tool, whose simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme is secure from active and passive attacks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of security features, computation cost, communication cost, and execution time.

With the development of intelligent transportation systems, the large-scale deployment of Roadside Units (RSUs) poses higher demands on the security, efficiency, and scalability of authentication and key agreement. However, the open wireless communication environment in intelligent transportation poses a significant security challenge, necessitating a reliable authentication and key agreement scheme to safeguard data on public channels from adversarial forgery and tampering. Nevertheless, in most conventional approaches, RSUs typically authenticate each other through the cloud. As the density of roadside units increases, cloud-based centralized authentication schemes face efficiency constraints due to computational and communication limitations. To address this issue, our paper introduces a security-enhanced and efficient cloud authentication and key agreement protocol. RSUs achieve mutual authentication using pre-shared keys and ECC-based public-private key pairs issued by the cloud, and subsequently establish session keys. Furthermore, this paper introduces a group key used to securely broadcast fundamental security messages among all members within a single RSU domain. The group key is updated whenever RSUs join or leave the group, ensuring that former members cannot access ongoing communications. Our scheme is rigorously evaluated through BAN logic and heuristic analysis, demonstrating robust security while simultaneously establishing superior computational and communication efficiency compared to existing approaches.

In 2009, Liao et al. proposed an exquisite mutual authentication scheme with key agreement using smart cards to access a network system legally and securely. Liao et al.'s scheme adopted a transformed identity (TID) to avoid identity duplication. However, we find out that an adversary may exploit TID to achieve offline guessing attack. Liao et al.'s scheme is also exposed to man-in-the-middle attack and their claimed theorems and proofs are incorrect. We conduct detailed analysis of flaws in the scheme and its security proof. This paper proposes an improved scheme to overcome these problems and preserve user anonymity that is an issue in e-commerce applications.

The open nature of wireless medical sensor networks in a public untrusted environment makes them vulnerable to various security threats and puts the security and privacy of patient information at risk. This paper introduces a new ECC based lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol to be used in real-time wireless medical sensor networks between doctors/nurses, trusted servers, sensors and patients. Unlike existing schemes, our scheme uses biometrics on both doctor/nurse and patient sides. It allows the doctor/nurse to login to the system using his/her fingerprint and verifies patient identity by means of continuous monitoring of physiological data (e.g., ECG signals) in which verification of the patient identity is carried out automatically and at set intervals to detect physical theft of the sensor which may be hooked on to a different patient. Our scheme also uses dynamic identity to provide user anonymity and mitigate against user traceability. Security analysis shows that our protocol is resistant to the user, sensor and patient impersonation attacks, physical sensor theft, and so on. Performance analysis proved our scheme to be competitive in comparison to existing schemes relative to the added security benefits it provides.

Security is considered as an important anxiety for applications which involve communication (more than two) over public networks. Group key management is one of the essential building blocks in securing group communication. Most of the researches in group key management are based on the general idea of the original Diffie–Hellman (DH) key agreement protocol. The major drawback of generalized DH for multi-party is the fact that there are expensive exponential operations to be carried out. The factors that influence the capability of a Group Key agreement (GKA) protocol are communication rounds and the computational cost. In this paper, the concept of neural cryptography, based on the mutual learning of Tree Parity Machine (TPM), is extended to operations to be carried out. The factors that influence the capability of a Group Key agreement (GKA) protocol are communication rounds and the computational cost. In this paper, the concept of neural cryptography, based on the mutual learning of Tree Parity Machine (TPM), is extended to obtain a group key. The group key has been generated for an interactive conference key agreement system, where the system authenticates the users and allows them to compute their own session key, and also it has been recognized that the neural network based GKA protocols achieve key freshness and key secrecy. The quantity demand and investment in research and development, while the other model focuses on a more realistic relationship between the quantity demand and the price.

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs)-based medical systems are an emerging paradigm of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in which the patients and doctors can access various healthcare services via wireless communication technology without visiting the hospital in person. However, an adversary attempts a variety of security attacks because the sensitive information in various fields is exchanged via an insecure channel. Thus, robust and lightweight authentication protocols are essential for providing dependable healthcare services in WMSN-based medical systems. Recently, Wang et al. (IEEE Internet of Things Journal, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2021.3117762) proposed blockchain and physically unclonable functions (PUFs)-based lightweight authentication protocol for WMSN. They claimed that their protocol is resistant to cyber and physical security threats and also does provide necessary security requirements. However, we prove that their protocol is vulnerable to various security attacks, such as man-in-the-middle and session key disclosure attacks and also lacks mutual authentication. As a result, we propose a robust authentication protocol for WMSN using blockchain and PUF to address the security problems raised by Wang et al.’s scheme. we assess the security of the proposed scheme by using informal and formal security analyses, such as AVISPA simulation and the ROR oracle model. Furthermore, we present the testbed experiments using Raspberry PI 4 based on MIRACL Crypto SDK. Then, we show the performance of the enhanced scheme compared with related schemes based on testbed experiments. Consequently, our scheme is better suited for practical WMSN-based medical systems because it provides greater security and efficiency than competing schemes.

In 2009, Xu et al. presented an improved smartcard based authentication scheme while using a security model previously applied by Bellare et al. to prove the security of their authentication methods. Later on, in 2012, Wu et al. pointed out number of authentication attacks in Xu et al. scheme. To address these issues, Wu et al. presented a Smartcard based Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) scheme for Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS) facility. In this study, we prove that authentication scheme of Wu et al. is still vulnerable to impersonation attack, offline password guessing attack, forgery attack and many other attacks. Moreover, number of performance and verification issues are also outlined in the authentication scheme of Wu et al. To overcome these issues, an improved and enhanced 3FA Smartphone based authentication method is proposed on a Cloud Computing environment. The proposed scheme is further corroborated using Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic (BAN logic) nonce verification. The detailed BAN logic verification and further security analysis shows that the proposed authentication protocol is highly reliable and secure in terms of message verifications, message freshness and trustworthiness of its origin. Moreover, the comparative security, performance and feature analysis shows that the proposed work yields an even more improved and enhanced authentication framework as compared to Wu et al. authentication scheme.

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables all objects to connect to the Internet and exchange data via different emerging technologies, which makes the intelligent identification and management a reality. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as a crucial basis of IoT, have been applied in many fields like smart health care and smart transportation. With the development of WSNs, data security has attracted more and more attention, and user authentication is a popular mechanism to ensure the information security of WSNs. Recently, many authentication mechanisms for wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) have been proposed, but most of the protocols cannot achieve the features of local password change and forward secrecy while resisting stolen smart card attack. To enhance the security based on previous work, an ECC-based secure three-factor authentication protocol with forward secrecy for WMSN is proposed in this paper. It utilizes a fuzzy commitment scheme to handle the biometric information. Meanwhile, fuzzy verifier and honey_list techniques are used to solve the contradiction of local password verification and mobile device lost attack. The security of our protocol is evaluated by provable security, Proverif tool, and information analysis. Besides, the comparisons with the relevant protocols are given, and the results indicate that our protocol is robust and secure for WMSN systems.

Until now, the pseudonym ID and one-time hash chain as the key technologies solve anonymous and forward secrecy properties, respectively, in lightweight authentication protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) environment. However, both techniques have to face the limitation of asynchronization attack, which will cause the pseudonym ID and one-time hash chain value between participants to be loss of synchronization when the transmitted message is blocked. Most recently, a serial of lightweight anonymous authentication scheme with forward secrecy (LAASFS) have been built to resolve this problem. Unfortunately, they failed to handle this question satisfactorily. Besides, most of them are still vulnerable to smart card loss attack (SCLA). In this article, to address these issues and make more effective, we combine pseudonym ID, one-time hash chain and tag techniques to construct an LAASFS for WSNs environment. The proposed LAASFS can be adaptive resilience of asynchronization attacks. In addition, it is also able to resist a variety of known attacks like SCLA and wrong password login attack. Formal analyses are taken by BAN logic and ProVerif tool to demonstrate the security of properties of our LAASFS. Compared with several previous related schemes, the proposed LAASFS possesses obvious advantages in computation and communication costs.