A Hybrid Mutual Authentication Scheme Based on Blockchain Technology for WBANs

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are important applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) in medical monitoring. WBANs are used to collect patients’ physiological information and to achieve the forwarding of sensitive information between patients and medical service center. Carried out through a public channel, the transmission of sensitive information is susceptible to unpredictable attacks. Therefore, mutual authentication and key agreement between the sensors on patients and the hub node of the medical service center need to be performed before the message transmission to ensure the security of message transmission in the network. A lightweight anonymous mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for two-hop blockchain WBANs is proposed in this paper. This scheme satisfies both security and lightweight requirements, making it possible to implement a mutual authenticate and key agreement between sensor nodes on patients and different hub nodes across regions. In addition, the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) is used to evaluate the security of the protocol. Finally, the computation cost and communication cost of the proposed protocol are compared with those of the related schemes, with the results showing that the proposed protocol shows a better energy consumption control.