Group authentication and key distribution for sensors in wireless body area network

Wireless body area network can be employed to collect patient’s electronic health data. To guarantee the reliability and confidentiality of the collected data, secure data transmission in wireless body area network is required. In wireless body area network, a mutual authentication process has to be carried out between the controller and sensors to ensure their legitimacy, and a key distribution mechanism is required to secure communication after successful mutual authentication. Li et al. proposed a cryptographic solution, which allows group device pairing authentication and key agreement but has low authentication efficiency and key leakage problems. To address these issues, a group authentication and key distribution scheme is proposed in this article. It enables effectively mutual authentication between controller and sensors, supports all signatures of sensors in the group to be checked by the controller through aggregation verification to achieve efficient authentication, and allows key distribution during authentication to improve the computation efficiency. Security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme enjoys existentially unforgeability, and theoretical and experimental comparison demonstrates its practicality in terms of computation and communication cost.

AN AUTHENTICATION FOR GROUP COMMUNICATIONS IN AD-HOC NETWORKS

Group communication implies a many-to-many communication and it goes beyond both one-to-one communication (i.e., unicast) and one-to-many communication (i.e., multicast). Unlike most user authentication protocols that authenticate a single user each time, we propose a new type of authentication, called group authentication that authenticates all users in a group at once. The group authentication protocol is specially designed to support group communications. There is a group manager who is responsible to manage the group communication. During registration, each user of a group obtains an unique token from the group manager. Users present their tokens to determine whether they all belong to the same group or not. The group authentication protocol allows users to reuse their tokens without compromising the security of tokens. In addition, the group authentication can protect the identity of each user.