A Robust <scp>ECC</scp> ‐Based Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

ABSTRACT The proliferation of remote patient monitoring presents new possibilities for the enhancement of smart healthcare systems. Wireless body area networks ( WBANs ) are an emerging technology for building a successful healthcare system. WBANs are integrated with the cloud to provide successful remote monitoring. However, WBANs are exposed to a variety of cryptographic attacks due to limited computational power. Several authentication approaches have been presented in recent years to address the security issues in WBANs . Yet, most authentication schemes failed to provide secure authentication and key agreement due to their reliance on computationally intensive operations. Therefore, we propose a secure authenticated key agreement approach for WBANs , emphasizing minimal computational overhead by utilizing lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as elliptic curve cryptography ( ECC ) and hash functions . The three‐way authentication process is used in this study to offer a safe mutual authentication approach between the patient and the healthcare service provider. Automated validation of internet security protocols and applications ( AVISPA ) has been used to verify the security of the proposed scheme in the presence of the Dolev‐Yao ( DY ) adversary model. Moreover, the security of the proposed scheme is also illustrated using Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham ( BAN ) predicates and the Real‐or‐Random ( ROR ) model. The performance evaluation in terms of computational complexity, along with the comparative analysis, demonstrates that the proposed approach provides enhanced security compared to existing approaches.