An Improved Three-Factor User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

Abstract

As wireless communication technology and semiconductor technology developed fast, the wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) have been applied to the modern health-care area at large. The physiological data can be obtained by medical sensor nodes deployed in the patient's body and sent to the special devices of the health professionals through wireless communication. Thus, the status of a patient is monitored by the health professional in that way. However, there are still two important issues that how to guarantee secure communication and protect the privacy of the patient for the reason of the open feature of wireless communication. In this paper, initially, an improved three-factor user authentication scheme is proposed to overcome those flaws utilizing password, smart card, and biometric feature. Furthermore, formal security analysis shows that the proposed scheme defends against various security pitfalls. Finally, the comparison results with other surviving relevant schemes show that our scheme is more efficient in terms of computational cost, communication cost, and estimated time. Therefore, the proposed scheme is suitable for practical application in WMSN.