BAN-GZKP: Optimal Zero Knowledge Proof Based Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

In this paper, we propose BAN-GZKP that optimizes the best to date secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme, BANZKP, designed for WBAN networks. BANZKP is vulnerable to several security attacks such as the replay attack, DDoS attacks at sink and redundancy information crack. Also BANZKP needs an end-to-end authentication which is not compliant with the human body postural mobility. Our scheme, BAN-GZKP, improves both the security and postural mobility resilience of BANZKP. In order to fix the security vulnerabilities of BANZKP, BAN-GZKP uses a novel random key allocation. Moreover, BAN-GZKP uses a hop-by-hop authentication scheme which makes it tolerant to postural mobility. We further prove the reliability of our scheme to various attacks including those to which BANZKP is vulnerable. Furthermore, via extensive simulations we prove that our scheme, BAN-GZKP, outperforms BANZKP in terms of reliability to human body postural mobility for various network parameters (end-to-end delay, number of packets exchanged in the network, number of transmissions). We compared both schemes using representative convergecast strategies with various transmission rates and human postural mobility. When our BAN-GZKP scheme is used the percentage of packets received increases by 34.06%, the end-to-end-delay reduces by 36.02% and the number of transmissions reduces by 8.75% with respect to the case when BANZKP is used. Moreover, BAN-GZKP uses only a three-phase authentication which is optimal in the class of ZKP protocols. Finally, it is important to mention that BAN-GZKP has no additional cost in terms memory, computational complexity or energy consumption compared to BANZKP.