Security is a critical issue for medical and health care systems. Password-based group-authenticated key agreement for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) allows a group of sensor nodes to negotiate a common session key by using password authentication and to establish a secure channel by this session key. Many group key agreement protocols use the public key infrastructure, modular exponential computations on an elliptic curve to provide high security, and thus increase sensor nodes’ overhead and require extra equipment for storing long-term secret keys. This work develops a novel group key agreement protocol using password authentication for WSNs, which is based on extended chaotic maps and does not require time-consuming modular exponential computations or scalar multiplications on an elliptic curve. Additionally, the proposed protocol is suitable for multiple independent groups and ensures that the real identities of group members cannot be revealed. The proposed protocol is not only more secure than related group key agreement protocols but also more efficient.

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