Mutual authentication in wireless body sensor networks (WBSN) based on Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)

Wireless sensor networks are capable of deploying large, self-organized and adaptable sets of sensors for military, environmental, healthcare, remote monitoring and many other applications. Unfortunately, the simplicity and low-cost nature of these sensors make it easy for attackers to clone the authentication protocol of compromised nodes in the network. Due to unprotected nature of the wireless sensor networks, an adversary can capture messages and compromise the safety of the sensor nodes, make replicas of the authentication codes and then launch a variety of attacks with these clones. In this paper, we propose a new mutual authentication scheme for the wireless body sensor networks which is based on a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). To identify between the sink and nodes we use a pair of challenge-response values, which are generated by the PUF in each sensor node. Also, each node needs to complete the hashed and MAC operations in the entire verification process. Analysis indicates that the scheme is efficient and robust against different attacks, such as clone attacks, replay attack, etc.