title: Secure anonymous mutual authentication for star two-tier wireless body area networks.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Mutual authentication is a very important service that must be established between sensor nodes in wireless body area network (WBAN) to ensure the originality and integrity of the patient's data sent by sensors distributed on different parts of the body. However, mutual authentication service is not enough. An adversary can benefit from monitoring the traffic and knowing which sensor is in transmission of patient's data. Observing the traffic (even without disclosing the context) and knowing its origin, it can reveal to the adversary information about the patient's medical conditions. Therefore, anonymity of the communicating sensors is an important service as well. Few works have been conducted in the area of mutual authentication among sensor nodes in WBAN. However, none of them has considered anonymity among body sensor nodes. Up to our knowledge, our protocol is the first attempt to consider this service in a two-tier WBAN. We propose a new secure protocol to realize anonymous mutual authentication and confidential transmission for star two-tier WBAN topology.
  
  
  METHODS
  The proposed protocol uses simple cryptographic primitives. We prove the security of the proposed protocol using the widely-accepted Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, and also through rigorous informal security analysis. In addition, to demonstrate the practicality of our protocol, we evaluate it using NS-2 simulator.
  
  
  RESULTS
  BAN logic and informal security analysis prove that our proposed protocol achieves the necessary security requirements and goals of an authentication service. The simulation results show the impact on the various network parameters, such as end-to-end delay and throughput. The nodes in the network require to store few hundred bits. Nodes require to perform very few hash invocations, which are computationally very efficient. The communication cost of the proposed protocol is few hundred bits in one round of communication. Due to the low computation cost, the energy consumed by the nodes is also low.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our proposed protocol is a lightweight anonymous mutually authentication protocol to mutually authenticate the sensor nodes with the controller node (hub) in a star two-tier WBAN topology. Results show that our protocol proves efficiency over previously proposed protocols and at the same time, achieves the necessary security requirements for a secure anonymous mutual authentication scheme.
authors: Department of Electronics, Communication and Computers, Faculty of Engineering, Helwan University, 1, Sherif St., Helwan, P.O.11792, Cairo, Egypt.
authors: Maged Hamada
authors: MH
authors: Ibrahim
authors: Department of Mathematics, Ch. Charan Singh University, Meerut, Uttar Pradesh 250 005, India.
authors: Saru
authors: S
authors: Kumari
authors: Center for Security, Theory and Algorithmic Research, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad 500 032, India. Electronic address: iitkgp.akdas@gmail.com.
authors: Ashok Kumar
authors: AK
authors: Das
authors: Center for Security, Theory and Algorithmic Research, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad 500 032, India.
authors: Mohammad
authors: M
authors: Wazid
authors: Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721 302, India; Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Chittoor, Sricity, Andhra Pradesh 517 588, India.
authors: Vanga
authors: V
authors: Odelu
mesh_terms: D015374:Biosensing Techniques; D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D016494:Computer Security; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D018907:Privacy; D011846:Radio Waves
keywords: Anonymity; Authentication; Key agreement; NS2 simulation; Security; Wireless body area networks