Certificateless pairing-free authentication scheme for wireless body area network in healthcare management system

Abstract

With the current advancement in technology, the use of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has become popular in the healthcare management. They provide a mechanism to collect and transmit physiological data to healthcare providers in remote locations. With the need to secure healthcare data becoming a global concern, mechanisms must be put in place to ensure secure communication of physiological data collected in WBANs. This paper, presents a new authentication scheme for WBANs based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Sensor nodes used in WBANs are resource constraint and for that reason, the proposed scheme is both certificateless and pairing-free. We compared the efficiency of our proposed authentication scheme with other related schemes and found that our scheme had considerable efficiency in terms of communication cost and running time.

Keywords:

• Authentication
• digital signature
• remote healthcare
• wireless body area networks

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.