A PUF-based anonymous authentication protocol for wireless medical sensor networks

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) play a major role in remote medical monitoring systems. Generally, in a WMSN, professionals need to obtain real-time physiological data of patients, and these data often encounter various security and privacy issues during the transmission process. Thus, the secure transmission of data is particularly critical. To ensure data security and patient privacy, many authentication schemes have been proposed. However, most of the existing schemes either cannot withstand known attacks (such as privileged-insider attack, desynchronization attack, etc.) or require more communication and computation costs, and are not suitable for resource-constrained WMSNs. Therefore, this paper proposes a new anonymous physically unclonable function (PUF)-based authentication protocol for WMSNs by using PUFs, fuzzy extractor, cryptographic one-way hash functions, and bitwise XOR operations. Formal security analysis under the real-or-random model shows that this scheme is provably secure. And informal security analysis shows that our scheme is secure against various known attacks. At the same time, compared with other existing related schemes, the proposed scheme not only provides more security and functionality features, but also requires less communication (5360 bits) and computation costs (57.047 ms).