Secure and low computation authentication protocol for Wireless Body Area Network with ECC and 2D hash chain

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network(WBAN) has developed as a technique for healthcare systems. In WBAN, patients can be remotely and constantly monitored by tiny wearable and portable sensors. The sensors collect patients' vital activity and movement data. Afterwards the data is sent via short-range wireless communication techniques to a data reader device which is called as a server. Since it is using shared wireless network, it may have chances to be attacked by unexpected adversaries. Therefore, security issues of WBAN are rapidly growing in the field of healthcare. Moreover, we need to care about the sensors' battery consumption and computation power because of resource-constrained WBAN. The sensors should be small and compact since they are located in, on, and around the patient's body for a long time. As a result, it is difficult to give a large battery capacity and strong computational power to the sensors. Thus, this paper proposes an authentication protocol which provides high level security and requires significantly low computation power on sensors for WBAN by using Elliptic Curves Cryptography(ECC) and two-dimensional hash chain techniques. The authentication procedure is very simple especially on the sensor side and 2D hash chain's key pool generation is also simple and efficient. Therefore, our protocol can be easily implemented in the power and resource constrained sensor nodes in WBAN.