Context-Aware Authorization and Anonymous Authentication in Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

With the pervasiveness of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the rapid progress of wireless communications, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have attracted significant interest from the research community in recent years. As a promising networking paradigm, it is adopted to improve the healthcare services and create a highly reliable ubiquitous healthcare system. However, the flourish of WBANs still faces many challenges related to security and privacy preserving. In such pervasive environment where the context conditions dynamically and frequently change, context-aware solutions are needed to satisfy the users' changing needs. Therefore, it is essential to design an adaptive access control scheme that can simultaneously authorize and authenticate users while considering the dynamic context changes. In this paper, we propose a context-aware access control and anonymous authentication approach based on a secure and efficient Hybrid Certificateless Signcryption (H-CLSC) scheme. The proposed scheme combines the merits of Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption (CP-ABSC) and Identity-BasedBroadcast Signcryption (IBBSC) in order to satisfy the security requirements and provide an adaptive contextual privacy. From a security perspective, it achieves confidentiality, integrity, anonymity, context-aware privacy, public verifiability, and ciphertext authenticity. Moreover, the key escrow and public key certificate problems are solved through this mechanism. Performance analysis demonstrates the efficiency and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to benchmark schemes in terms of functional security, storage, communication and computational cost.

Context-Aware Adaptive Remote Access for IoT Applications

“…As illustrated in Fig. 4, the communication cost of H-CLSC [7] linearly increases with the number of users but in our scheme, it is independent of the number of users.…”

“…This section deals with the comparisons of security properties, storage, computation and communication costs among the proposed scheme and other existing schemes, such as H-CLSC [7], CP-ABE [17], and PPDAS [20]. We notice that the benchmark schemes use different cryptographic techniques to design the access control algorithm.…”

“…In addition, when the context changes, only contextual tokens will change. However, even if H-CLSC [7] ensures flexibility, it introduces additional revocation to revoke users' attributes which are related to context changes. Furthermore, compared to existing schemes [17], [20] implementing CP-ABE, our scheme solves the key escrow problem.…”

“…Consequently, it seems crucial to conceive an effective access control scheme that grants adaptive data access to authorized users for a multivalued context. A trivial solution to handle the above challenge is to integrate a user's role and the contextual parameters into access policies as a set of normal attributes [7]. However, the main difference between a dynamic context and a set of attribute is that attributes are assigned to users according to their identities which will be statically maintained for a long time while the contextual information involves a set of dynamic conditions, which are frequently changing over time.…”

“…For instance, if a contextual parameter such as location/time is considered as a normal attribute of the user, the attribute set will change permanently anywhere at any time. For instance, in [7], whenever the context changes, the key generator center (KGC) issues a new contextual decryption key to guarantee data confidentiality. This solution is obviously burdensome in real scenarios and introduces heavy computation and communication cost [3].…”