Authentication protocol for an ambient assisted living system

Recent advances in healthcare technologies along with improved medical care have led to a steady increase in life expectancy over the past few decades. As a result, we have been witnessing a significant growth in the number of elderly people around the world. Ensuring a comfortable living environment for elderly people has gained much attention in recent years. By leveraging information and communication technologies, the AAL system shows great promise in satisfying many requirements of elderly people and enables them to live safely, securely, healthily, and independently. Over the last few years various AAL systems, mostly based on Wireless Body Area Network technologies, have been proposed to improve the quality of life of elderly people. Since the information transmitted in AAL systems is very personal, the security and privacy of such data are becoming important issues that must be dealt with. We first discuss the overall system architecture of a typical AAL system and its associated security requirements. Next we propose an efficient authentication protocol for the AAL system and describe how it meets various security requirements. Finally we compare the performance of the proposed authentication protocol with two other recent authentication protocols and demonstrate its superior efficiency.