A new authentication protocol for healthcare applications using wireless medical sensor networks with user anonymity

Abstract

With the development and maturation of the wireless communication technologies, the wireless sensor networks have been widely applied in different environments to acquire specific information. The wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs), as a professional application of the wireless sensor networks in medicine, have attracted more and more attention because of its potential in improving the quality of healthcare services. Through the WMSNs, the parameters of patients' vital signs can be gathered from the sensor nodes equipped on the body of the patients and then can be accessed by the healthcare professionals by using a mobile device. By reason of the open feature of wireless communication, how to guarantee secure communication becomes an important issue. On the other hand, because the vital signs parameters are sensitive to the patients' health status and no one wants to reveal it to the others except the healthcare professionals, the protection of patients' privacy becomes another key issue for WMSNs applications. User authentication protocol with anonymity is the most basic and commonly used method to resolve the security and privacy issues of WMSNs. Recently, He et al. proposed an enhanced authentication protocol for healthcare applications using WMSNs to protect the security and privacy problems. However, we find that their scheme is incorrect in authentication and session key agreement phase. Besides, their scheme has no wrong password detection mechanism, which will not only waste the unnecessary computation and communication costs, but also may deduce the denial of service problem. In this paper, the biometric is introduced as the third authentication factor, and a new user anonymous authentication protocol based on WMSNs is designed so as to remove the drawbacks of the protocol of He et al. Compared with previous protocols, the new presented protocol enhances the security and also keeps the computation efficiency. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An improved and anonymous two-factor authentication protocol for health-care applications with wireless medical sensor networks

“…Li et al [23] showed that He et al's scheme was under the de-synchronization attack. This attack occurs if there is some inconsistency in a legal users normal authentication process.…”

“…This will lead to the failure of subsequent authentication. [23] criticized the password change phase, which is under the de-synchronization attack. We only use their conclusion and omit the phase here.…”

“…So He et al presented an improvement. But Li et al[23] pointed out that the improvement has weaknesses such as no password detection and under the de-synchronization attack. Moreover, we find that there are some other disadvantages in He et al's scheme.…”

A Secure and Anonymous Two-Factor Authentication Protocol in Multiserver Environment

“…Besides, it is widely accepted that an adversary has the full control of the channel; that is, A can intercept, delete, modify, resend, and reroute the messages in an open channel [33][34][35]. Furthermore, A may also learn users' passwords via a malicious terminal or extract the parameters from the smart card by side-channel attack, but cannot achieve both [2,27,36].…”

Robust Distributed Reprogramming Protocol of Wireless Sensor Networks for Healthcare Systems

“…However, we find that Shim's proposed improved protocol is unworkable because the signature verification does not hold true. Among various secure protocols in WSNs [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], most of the published reprogramming protocols [3, 6, 12-14, 16, 18, 20-23] are based on the centralized approach, which assumes the existence of a base station, and only the base station has the authority to reprogram sensor nodes. The centralized approach is not reliable in reality because of inefficiency, weak scalability, and vulnerability to potential attacks along the communication path [24].…”