EAKE-WC: Efficient and Anonymous Authenticated Key Exchange Scheme for Wearable Computing

Wearable computing has shown tremendous potential to revolutionize and uplift the standard of our lives. However, researchers and field experts have often noted several privacy and security vulnerabilities in the field of wearable computing. In order to tackle these problems, various schemes have been proposed in the literature to improve the efficiency of authentication and key establishment procedure. However, the existing schemes have relatively high computation and communication overheads and are not resilient to various potential security attacks, which reduces their significance for applicability in constrained wearable devices. In this work, we propose an efficient and anonymous authenticated key exchange scheme for wearable computing (EAKE-WC), which performs mutual authentication between the user and the wearable device, and between the cloud server and the user. It also establishes secret session keys for each session to secure communication among the communicating entities. Additionally, the proposed EAKE-WC scheme is designed using authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) primitives like ASCON, bitwise XOR, and hash functions. Our results from the security analysis depict compliance of the proposed EAKE-WC with wearable computing's security criteria. In addition, we also demonstrate through a comprehensive comparative analysis that the proposed scheme, EAKE-WC, outperforms the existing benchmark schemes in various key performance areas, including lower communication and computational overheads, enhanced security, and added functionality.