Efficient end-to-end authentication protocol for wearable health monitoring systems

Abstract

Wearable health monitoring systems (WHMSs) will play an increasingly important role in future e-healthcare and enable smart and ubiquitous healthcare services. Given its sensitivity, the health data should be protected against unauthorized access. As a result, it is critical to design an end-to-end mutual authentication protocol that enables secure communication between the wearable sensor and medical professionals. Recently, Amin et al. proposed an anonymity preserving mutual authentication protocol for WHMSs. However, we identify that their protocol suffers from stolen mobile device attack, desynchronization attack, and sensor key exposure. Then we put forward an improved end-to-end authentication protocol based on quadratic residues. Comprehensive security analysis is conducted to show that the proposed protocol fixes these flaws of Amin et al.’s protocol and satisfies all desired requirements. The comparison with these existing protocols demonstrates that our protocol provides a practical end-to-end security solution for WHMSs.