A robust and anonymous patient monitoring system using wireless medical sensor networks

In wireless medical sensor network (WMSN), bio-sensors are implanted within the patient body to sense the sensitive information of a patient which later on can be transmitted to the remote medical centers for further processing. The patient's data can be accessed using WMSN by medical professionals from anywhere across the globe with the help of Internet. As the patient sensitive information is transmitted over an insecure WMSN, so providing a secure access and privacy of the patient's data are challenging issues in WMSN environments. However, in literature, to provide secure data access, few user authentication protocols exist. Most of these existing protocols may not be applicable to WMSNs for providing user's anonymity. To fill these gaps, in this article, we propose an architecture for patient monitoring health-care system in WMSN and then design an anonymity-preserving mutual authentication protocol for mobile users. We used the AVISPA tool to simulate the proposed protocol. The results obtained indicate that the proposed authentication protocol resists the existing well known attacks. In addition, the BAN logic model confirms mutual authentication feature of the proposed protocol. Moreover, an informal cryptanalysis is also given, which ensures that the proposed protocol withstands all known attacks. We perform a comparative discussion of the proposed protocol against the existing protocols and the comparative results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is efficient and robust. Specifically, the proposed protocol is not only effective in providing robustness against common security threats, but it also offers an efficient login, robust mutual authentication, and user-friendly password change.