A Secure IoT-Based Mutual Authentication for Healthcare Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks Using ECC

1. Introduction

WMSNs play a crucial role in internet of things (IoT) and are extensively used in a lot of healthcare applications to collect the information/data of the observing patients’ body. IoT is an evolving technology that makes remote sensing a reality. But, owing to wireless network and limitation of resources in sensor nodes, it’s difficult to assure that authorised user only reads the sensitive data is an essential task in IoT atmosphere (Zhu & Huang, 2017). Certain authentication schemes have been proposed to care for this problem. However, earlier schemes possess their flaws, such as susceptible to one or the other attacks or not providing feature like user anonymity. To have secure communication between user and sensor, user authentication scheme with security protection for healthcare applications is designed in this paper.

Usually, WMSNs is designed by a user or healthcare professionals like nurses or doctor, gateway node (GWN) and many sensor nodes through a wireless channel, in which sensors are used to gather data for a particular patient and then these data are to be forwarded to designated professional [(Singh, Singh, Kumar & Chand, 2018)]. Usually, sensor nodes have restricted resources like storage, computing power etc. while GWN has no resource limitation (Singh & Singh, 2018). Hence, the authenticity of a user (or patient) is the main test for safety of IoT in WMSNs. Along with key management (Fakhrey, Tiwari, Johnston & Al-Mathehaji, 2016) authentication is also required for verification of legitimate user in WMSNs, as a main safety mechanism. The main idea is that user, GWN and the sensor should be mutually authenticated to each other. The user can start a session by doing user registration, followed by login to GWN, and then GWN may request a sensor node to gather information wished by user. At successful verification, user accepts message from GWN (Singh, Singh, Kumar, & Chand, 2018), (Singh, Kumar, Singh, Chand, 2019). But, wireless sensor network (WSN) is prone to security attacks due to its wireless channel. Due to the limited capability of sensor, it makes cryptography algorithms like RSA not appropriate for WSN. Because of size and cost restrictions on sensors, there is a limitation on resources such as computation power, storage space, computation cost, and communication bandwidth.

Furthermore, applications of WSNs are very delicate concerning security. At the same time, it is expected that authentication scheme should possess most of the functionality features like mutual authentication, key agreement and should be safe against most of the security attacks. Hence, to design an efficient authentication scheme for WMSNs considering limited resources as well as security from various attacks is a big challenge. In this paper, a novel user authentication protocol using ECC that provides all well-known security features is proposed.

1.1 Elliptic Curve Over Prime Field GF(p)

Assume P is a large prime number. An elliptic curve over galois field is explained by equation , where and . All points on and point called infinity form an additive group G. A Hasse’s theorem (Mahto, & Yadav, 2018) declares that points on denoted by and it fulfils the following inequality It can also be explained as an elliptic curve over has approximately points on it. If and be two points in , then addition of P and Q is calculated as and it is computed as follows:

Where and . If P is a generator of G then scalar multiplication

• Definition 1 (Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP)): Given a point , it is difficult to calculate discrete logarithm such that

• Definition 2 (Elliptic Curve Computational Diffie-Hellman problem (ECCDHP)): If there are two points for it is difficult to calculate .

• Definition 3 (Elliptic Curve Decisional Diffie-Hellman problem (ECDDHP)): If there are three points , it is difficult to find whether here .