Re-AuTh: Lightweight Re-Authentication with Practical Key Management for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

The development in wireless body area networks (WBANs) has facilitated a growth in electronic health in terms of quality and efficiency. Telemonitoring systems observe human vital signs without the need for a patient to be present using WBANs. The data sensitivity of WBAN, mobile users and public channels poses a critical challenge to security and privacy in order to prevent unauthorized access to vital health data. Several solutions have been suggested to ensure secure and effective communications in WBANs; nonetheless, these methods tend to have drawbacks, such as efficiency overhead and protection vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a lightweight authentication and also provides a protocol for re-authentication (Re-AuTh). The proposed “Re-AuTh” utilizes identification and authorization tokens to assist the application provider in authenticating and further to authorize medical users. Such tokens also provide a way to achieve effective key management. The Scyther simulation shows that the proposed Re-AuTh has no security vulnerabilities and the informal security analysis further ensures protection of all related possible threats. The performance comparisons with related solutions showed that the proposed Re-AuTh effectively provides security services for WBAN in the medical environment and greatly reduces computation costs at the user side.