Design of a lightweight and anonymous authenticated key agreement protocol for wireless body area networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are a network designed to gather critical information about the physical conditions of patients and to exchange this information. WBANs are prone to attacks, more than other networks, because of their mobility and the public channel they use. Therefore, mutual authentication and privacy protection are critical for WBANs to prevent attackers from accessing confidential information of patients and executing undetectable physical attacks. In addition, in the authentication and key agreement process, messages should be transferred anonymously such that they are not linkable. In this paper, we first indicate that one of the most recently introduced authentication protocol is vulnerable to the wrong session key agreement attack and desynchronization attack. Second, we propose a lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol, which can withstand the well-known attacks and provide the anonymity feature. Eventually, we analyze the security of our proposed protocol using both Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) and random oracle model and compare its performance with the related works. The results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed protocol in comparison with the other protocols.