Efficient Certificateless Anonymous Mutual Authentication in WBANs for Smart Healthcare

The real challenge in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) lies in ensuring the security of health-related sensitive data and diagnostic information, preventing unauthorized access by malicious users. Given that information exchange takes place between the WBAN client and the Application Provider (AP), there is a critical need for thorough attention to mutual authentication and secure key generation. Many of the available research works lack the addressing of essential security features such as strong anonymity, key confidentiality, and key-escrow resilience. The primary focus of this research work is to develop a certificateless anonymous mutual authentication scheme that will be computationally efficient and memory-optimized, while maintaining uncompromising security features. Our scheme excels over other schemes due to its utilization of a hybrid approach, which integrates cryptographic operations related to the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP), Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP), and bi-linear pairings. This approach maintains strong security features and also enhances the performance of the system. The proposed scheme improves computational cost, storage cost, and communication cost by at least 15%, 41%, and 10%, respectively, compared to the best available schemes. We have also verified our protocol using formal and informal approaches. Formal logic analysis and simulation of our scheme ensure its potential to significantly enhance user privacy and strengthen mutual authentication in Smart healthcare systems.