Lightweight and Certificateless Multi-Receiver Secure Data Transmission Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

The rapid development of low-power integrated circuits, wireless communication, intelligent sensors, and microelectronics has allowed the realization of wireless body area networks (WBANs), which can monitor patients’ vital body parameters remotely in real time to offer timely treatment. These vital body parameters are related to patients’ life and health; and these highly private data are subject to many security threats. To guarantee privacy, many secure communication protocols have been proposed. However, most of these protocols have a one-to-one structure in extra-body communication and cannot support multidisciplinary team (MDT). Hence, we propose a lightweight and certificateless multi-receiver secure data transmission protocol for WBANs to support MDT treatment in this article. In particular, a novel multi-receiver certificateless generalized signcryption (MR-CLGSC) scheme is proposed that can adaptively use only one algorithm to implement one of three cryptographic primitives: signature, encryption or signcryption. Then, a multi-receiver secure data transmission protocol based on the MR-CLGSC scheme with many security properties, such as data integrity and confidentiality, non-repudiation, anonymity, forward and backward secrecy, unlinkability and data freshness, is designed. Both security analysis and performance analysis show that the proposed protocol for WBANs is secure, efficient, and highly practical.