Authentication in Wireless Body Area Network: Taxonomy and Open Challenges

: Wearable body area network (WBAN) aids the communication between the health providers and patients by supporting health monitoring services. It assists the users to maintain their health status records by collecting the body signals and transmitting them for further processing measurements. However, sensor data are publicly transferred through insecure network that facilitates the attacker malicious acts like performing masquerading attack, man in the middle, and snooping. Several authentication techniques were suggested to levitate the security of the communication channels to preserve the user data from exposure. Moreover, authentication schemes aid plenty of security issues related to user and data privacy, anonymity, repudiation, confidentiality, and integrity, but they lack performance efficiency. On the other hand, it is very hard to find the balance between security and efficiency in most of the authentication schemes, especially for the WBAN platform that consists of memory and processing constraint devices. Therefore, this paper surveys and discusses the latest authentication schemes types, techniques, and system features. Also, it highlights their strengths and weaknesses towards common knowingly attacks and provides a comparison between the popular scheme validation proofs and simulation tools. Thence, this paper draws a path for the new direction of the authentication technologies, the authentication schemes open issues, and the potential future evolution in this area.