Secure and Lightweight Authentication for Mobile-Edge Computing-Enabled WBANs

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) technology nowadays has become a promising networking paradigm in the Internet of Things (IoT) as it can provide people with high quality of life and high level of medical service. In order to ensure the security and privacy of patients’ sensitive biomedical data and the efficiency of message processing across different devices, it is critical to provide a secure and lightweight authentication scheme for WBANs. In this article, we propose an extra lightweight authentication scheme for mobile-edge computing-enabled WBANs. Two different authentication phases based on the modular square roots technique are designed: one is the intra-BAN authentication between the sensor node and edge node (EN), and the other is the inter-BAN authentication between EN and application provider. The proposed scheme offers robust security by providing comprehensive security analysis. Performance is also evaluated in terms of computation, communication, and storage costs. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a reduction of at least 90% in computation cost and at least 30% in communication cost when compared to four other related schemes.