Resilient authentication protocol for electronic healthcare enabled wireless body area networks using distributed ledger

Abstract

The recent developments in telecommunication technologies and monitoring devices have brought many changes in modern electronic healthcare systems (EHSs) by improving quality and decreasing healthcare expenses. Despite the benefits, they have privacy and security issues because the communication between patients and service providers takes place generally over public channels. Several user authentication protocols using distributed ledger technology (DLT) have recently been proposed to address these issues in EHSs. However, many are still vulnerable to a single point of failure (SPoF), privacy, and security attacks. Besides, they suffered from high communication and computational costs. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a user authentication protocol using DLT to avoid these issues. A Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic proof method has been used to check the security of the proposed protocol and ensure it achieves the desired security goals. In addition, an informal security analysis has been conducted to verify its important security requirements. A formal security analysis has been performed via the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool and Real-or-Random (ROR) model for further security strength. The results demonstrate that the proposed user authentication protocol is SAFE against all types of Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, impersonation, replay, and forgery attacks . Finally, performance analysis has been performed and results show that it achieves better performance by consuming 29.63 % and 13.21 % less communication and computational overheads as compared to existing related user authentication protocols. The security and performance analysis make it a more appropriate choice for the EHSs.