A secure three factor authentication scheme for wirelesshealthcare sensor networks based on elliptic curve

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) include many tiny sensor nodes which are planted in or around a patient’s body. These sensor nodes can collect biomedical data from the patient and transmit these valuable data to a data sink or a personal digital assistant. Later, health care service providers can get access to these data through authorization. The biomedical data are usually personal and private. Consequently, data confidentiality and user privacy are of primary concerns for WBAN. One of the most important factors for providing security in e-healthcare networks, is authentication protocols which allow both parties to authenticate each other. Recently, regarding this issue, Challa et al.[1] presented an efficient elliptic curve based provably secure three-factor key agreement and authentication protocol for wireless healthcare sensor networks. In this paper, firstly we identify some security flaws of the Challa et al.’s scheme such as privileged-insider attacks, lack of forward secrecy and user traceability. Then, we present a three-factor authentication scheme for (WBANs) and evaluate the security properties of our scheme formally via “ProVerif”. Presented security analysis and comparisons show that the proposed scheme is an efficient secure authentication scheme for WBANs.