An Improved Anonymous Authentication Protocol in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are technologies that create wireless networks around the human body by embedding sensors into wearable devices to collect health data. WBANs are mainly used for real-time health monitoring, motion tracking, and emergency medical services, with advantages, such as low energy consumption, short-range communication, and high data security. However, user privacy protection and communication security during transmission are important considerations in the design of WBANs communication. To address the aforementioned issues, this article presents a secure authentication key agreement protocol in WBANs. Through Scyther software analysis, it demonstrates the protocol satisfies security attributes, such as user anonymity, known session key security, forward security, resistance to ephemeral key leakage attacks, and resistance to impersonation attacks. The protocol has also been verified to be secure within the eCK model. Moreover, this article compares the security attributes, computation cost, communication consumption, energy consumption, and average delay time of the proposed protocol with other authentication key agreement protocols. It is found that the proposed protocol has excellent performance while ensuring communication security, and strikes a balance between security effectiveness and resource overhead.