TinyZKP: A Lightweight Authentication Scheme Based on Zero-Knowledge Proof for Wireless Body Area Networks

Limin Ma, Yu Ge, Yuesheng Zhu

Abstract: Secure communication over wireless body area network (WBAN) is a key issue in the design and deployment of WBAN systems, in which the authentication of sensor node is a critical process. Conventional authentication schemes are not suitable to the sensor node because of the limitations of memory, computational power and energy in the node. In order to provide an efficient method to verify the identity of sender sensor nodes of WBAN, in this paper a lightweight authentication scheme, TinyZKP, based on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is proposed and implemented on TinyOS-based sensor nodes. Our experimental results show that, compared to two ECDSA-based authentication schemes in TinyECC and WM-ECC, the TinyZKP runs 1.9 and 1.4 times faster and the energy cost is reduced by 48 % and 28 %, respectively.