A Key-Agreement Protocol Based on Static Parameters and Hash Functions

TL;DR

This paper analyzes security issues in a lightweight key agreement scheme for wireless body sensor networks and proposes an improved protocol that enhances anonymity, unlinkability, and reduces energy and communication costs.

Contribution

It introduces a new AKA scheme that ensures anonymity and unlinkability, addressing security flaws in previous schemes while significantly reducing resource consumption.

Findings

Reduces average energy consumption and computation time by 61%.

Decreases average communication cost by 41%.

Provides comparable security features to recent schemes.

Abstract

Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) is a developing technology with constraints in energy consumption, coverage radius, communication reliability. Also, communications between nodes contain very sensitive personal information in which sometimes due to the presence of hostile environments, there are a wide range of security risks. As such, designing authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols is an important challenge in these networks. Recently, Li et al. proposed a lightweight scheme using the hash and XOR functions which is much more efficient compared with similar schemes based on elliptic curve. However, the investigations revealed that the claim concerning the unlinkability between the sessions of a sensor node is NOT true. The present paper considers the security issues of the scheme proposed by Li et al. and some of its new extensions in order to propose a new AKA scheme with anonymity and unlinkability of the sensor node sessions. The results of theoretical analysis compared with similar schemes indicate that the proposed scheme reduces average energy consumption and average computation time by 61 percent while reduces the average communication cost by 41 percent. Further, it has been shown by formal and informal analysis that, Besides the two anonymity and unlinkability features, the other main features of the security in the proposed scheme are comparable and similar to the recent similar schemes.