A Formal Security Verification on He and Zeadally's Authentication Protocol for IMD-Enabled Ambient Assisted Living System

Abstract

Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) play a very critical role in both medical and non-medical fields. Hence, protecting the security and privacy of these devices is among the highest priorities, as failing to do so would jeopardize the life of the patient. One way of maintaining the safety of IMDs is to design an authentication protocol between the IMDs and the external devices. With this regard, although several authentication schemes exist, a significant number of these protocols did not include formal verification to prove their secrecy against known attacks. One such authentication scheme is the He and Zeadally protocol for IMD-Enabled Ambient Assisted Living System. Accordingly, in this paper, we analyzed the security of this protocol by using formal verification methods -BAN-Logic and AVISPA. As a result, despite the protocol's strong qualities, we found that the protocol is insecure and fell short of other essential such as emergency authentication and key-update procedures.