An efficient three-factor authentication protocol for wireless healthcare sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a significant role in the health care industry in this digitised world. This technology is used to monitor and store the health-related data for patients. As a result, if such data is not kept secure, it can pose a serious threat to the patient’s life. Maintaining the anonymity of such data is an equally important task. As WSNs use an open channel to transfer data between sensor nodes, users and gateway, they are vulnerable to attackers. A user authentication strategy for remote healthcare applications has been recently developed by Soni et al. However, it has been noted in this work that this user authentication approach is not secure against user impersonation attack and offline password-guessing attack. Additionally, to overcome the shortcomings of the Soni et al.’s protocol, an effective user authentication protocol for wireless healthcare sensor networks has been put forth. The formal security verification of the proposed protocol is carried out using the ProVerif tool and the formal verification of mutual authentication is demonstrated using BAN logic. Its performance in terms of cost associated with communication, storage and computation along with its security aspects is compared to those of the other similar schemes. From such a comparison, it is evident that the proposed protocol is more secure.