Security Improvement of the Enhanced 1-round Authentication Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has attracted a huge interest following the development of microelectronics, miniaturized sensors and the advancement of wireless communication. However, medical data are very sensitive and any modification or eavesdropping of the physiological data may affect the diagnosis or the privacy of the patient, so, the security in WBAN remains a big challenge. Therefore, it is important to ensure a secure mutual authentication between the network entities to protect the user's information from being corrupted and to ensure the privacy of the patient. In this paper, first, we review the security of Li et al.'s authentication scheme which is the most recently proposed protocol in this field. Then, we propose an improved version to overcome flaws found in Li et al.'s scheme. The security and performance analysis show that the improved protocol presents better security features.