E-SAP: Efficient-Strong Authentication Protocol for Healthcare Applications Using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

TLDR

Wireless medical sensor networks can non‑invasively monitor patients’ vital signs, but the highly sensitive data they transmit are vulnerable to attacks, making strong user authentication essential for large‑scale deployment. This study proposes E‑SAP, an efficient, strong authentication protocol for healthcare applications using WMSNs. E‑SAP combines two‑factor professional authentication, mutual authentication between professional and sensor, symmetric encryption, session key establishment, and password change, all achieved through three message exchanges to keep computation and communication costs low. Formal, security, and performance analyses demonstrate that E‑SAP is more secure against practical attacks and offers a tunable trade‑off between security and performance for WMSN healthcare applications.

Abstract

A wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) can sense humans’ physiological signs without sacrificing patient comfort and transmit patient vital signs to health professionals’ hand-held devices. The patient physiological data are highly sensitive and WMSNs are extremely vulnerable to many attacks. Therefore, it must be ensured that patients’ medical signs are not exposed to unauthorized users. Consequently, strong user authentication is the main concern for the success and large scale deployment of WMSNs. In this regard, this paper presents an efficient, strong authentication protocol, named E-SAP, for healthcare application using WMSNs. The proposed E-SAP includes: (1) a two-factor (i.e., password and smartcard) professional authentication; (2) mutual authentication between the professional and the medical sensor; (3) symmetric encryption/decryption for providing message confidentiality; (4) establishment of a secure session key at the end of authentication; and (5) professionals can change their password. Further, the proposed protocol requires three message exchanges between the professional, medical sensor node and gateway node, and achieves efficiency (i.e., low computation and communication cost). Through the formal analysis, security analysis and performance analysis, we demonstrate that E-SAP is more secure against many practical attacks, and allows a tradeoff between the security and the performance cost for healthcare application using WMSNs.