Physically secure and fog-enabled lightweight authentication scheme for WBAN

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are vital for healthcare, fitness monitoring, and remote patient care by means of combining sensors and wearable technologies for data collection and transmission. However, ensuring secure communication in WBANs remains a critical challenge and is generally insecure against the manipulation of data, breaches of privacy, and unauthorized access. Current authentication methods are vulnerable to security risks and have a significant computational burden. The above-said shortcomings are addressed by proposing a lightweight, physically secure, fog-enabled authentication scheme that guarantees data privacy and system resilience by integrating Physically Unclonable Functions ( $$\:PUFs$$ ) and Fog Computing. This approach involves two phases: WBAN node registration and secure anonymous authentication. The proposed system incurs a reduction in computational overhead of 64.33% and communication overhead of 29.58% compared to existing protocols. Short-life session keys are used to achieve mutual authentication between WBAN sensors and monitoring devices. The proposed scheme is analyzed using BAN logic against attacks on impersonation, replay, and unauthorized access using BAN logic. Its practical effectiveness is confirmed via informal analysis, which shows that it is a scalable and efficient solution for practical WBAN environments.