Provably Secure PUF-Based Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are used in modern medical service environments for the convenience of patients and medical professionals. Owing to the recent COVID-19 pandemic and an aging society, WBANs are attracting attention. In a WBAN environment, the patient has a sensor node attached to him/her that collects patient status information, such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and pulse; this information is simultaneously transmitted to his/her respective medical professional through a gateway. The medical professional receives and checks the patient’s status information and provides a diagnosis. However, sensitive information, including the patient’s personal and status data, are transmitted via a public channel, causing security concerns. If an adversary intercepts this information, it could threaten the patient’s well-being. Therefore, a secure authentication scheme is essential for WBAN environments. Recently, Chen et al. proposed a two-factor authentication scheme for WBANs. However, we found out Chen et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to a privileged insider, physical cloning, verification leakage, impersonation, and session key disclosure attacks. We also propose a secure physical-unclonable-function (PUF)-based lightweight mutual authentication scheme for WBANs. Through informal security analysis, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme using biometrics and the PUF is safe against various security attacks. In addition, we verify the security features of our scheme through formal security analyses using Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, the real-or-random (RoR) model, and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA). Furthermore, we evaluate the security features, communication costs, and computational costs of our proposed scheme and compare them with those of other related schemes. Consequently, our scheme is more suitable for WBAN environments than the other related schemes