A Lightweight and Secure Protocol for Wireless Medical Sensor Networks in IoT Systems

Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are a key component of modern Healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) systems, enabling continuous and real-time monitoring of patients’ physiological parameters. These networks support timely medical intervention, improve patient outcomes, and facilitate remote healthcare delivery. However, due to the open and resource-constrained nature of WMSNs, they are highly susceptible to various security threats, particularly during the authentication phase. Existing authentication protocols have been found vulnerable to a range of attacks, including impersonation, session key disclosure, and gateway database compromise, which can lead to severe privacy breaches and potentially life-threatening situations. To address these issues, this paper proposes a secure and lightweight three-factor authentication protocol tailored for WMSNs in healthcare IoT environments. The proposed protocol integrates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for strong public key-based security with minimal computational overhead, fuzzy extractors to securely handle biometric information and ensure resistance against biometric template compromise, and session-based randomness to achieve forward secrecy and prevent replay or key-compromise impersonation attacks. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol successfully mitigates prominent threats such as impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, session key leakage, and database compromise. In addition, the protocol ensures mutual authentication between the user, the gateway, and the sensor nodes, while maintaining data confidentiality and integrity. Performance evaluation indicates that the protocol offers significantly reduced computational cost and communication delay compared to existing schemes. Its low energy consumption and minimal storage requirements make it suitable for deployment in resource-constrained medical devices and large-scale IoT healthcare networks. The results highlight the protocol’s scalability, energy efficiency, and robustness, making it a practical and secure solution for safeguarding patient data and ensuring trustworthy communication in WMSNs-based healthcare IoT systems.