Abstract
In wireless medical sensor network (WMSN), bio-sensors are implanted within the patient body to sense the sensitive information of a patient which later on can be transmitted to the remote medical centres for further processing. The patient’s data can be accessed using WMSN by medical professionals from anywhere across the globe with the help of Internet. As the patient sensitive information is transmitted over an insecure WMSN, so providing the secure access and privacy of the patient’s data are various challenging issues in WMSN environments. To provide secure data access, in the literature very less number of user authentication protocols are available. But, most of these existing protocols may not be applicable to WMSNs for providing user’s anonymity. In this article, we propose an architecture for patient monitoring health-care system in WMSN and then design an anonymitypreserving mutual authentication protocol for mobile users. We used the AVISPA tool to simulate the proposed protocol. The results obtained indicate that the proposed authentication protocol resists the known attacks. In addition, the BAN logic model confirms mutual authentication feature of the proposed protocol. Moreover, an informal cryptanalysis is also given, which ensures that the proposed protocol withstands all known attacks. We perform a comparative discussion of the proposed protocol against the existing protocols and the comparative results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is efficient and robust. Specifically, the proposed protocol is not only effective for complexity and robustness against common security threats, but it also offers efficient login, robust mutual authentication, and user-friendly password change phases.
