A Review on Authentication Schemes for Wireless Body Area Networks Aqeel-ur-Rehman, Iqbal Uddin Khan, Ali Yousuf Khan aqeel.rehman@hamdard.edu, iqbalsound@yahoo.com, alikhan188@yahoo.com Graduate School of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Faculty of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Hamdard University, Karachi, Pakistan. Abstract— Authentication is the first step towards security. Better authentication scheme prevents the networks from imposters and unwanted users effectively. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is highly focused domain by researchers in recent era that is evolved from Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Keeping the importance of WBAN, it has been considered as standard by IEEE in February 2012. Being the wireless network, WBAN is exposed to security threats. IEEE 802.15.6-2012 standard for WBAN encompasses many of the security related requirements including the authentication process. This paper is an attempt to present the critical review of the proposed authentication schemes for WBAN as per IEEE standard. Keywords — Authentication, Wireless Body Area Networks, IEEE 802.15.6, Security, WSN. I. INTRODUCTION Security in any network especially wireless networks is highly needed. Authentication process is one of the initial steps for security implemented to prevent from the unauthorized users and imposters. Authentication schemes vary as per the nature of network. Wireless sensor network is one of the networks based on mobile and tiny smart devices having constrains toward power, computation, memory etc. For such networks, there is a need of specific light weight authentication schemes. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been focused significantly by research community in recent years [1, 2, 3]. Body Area Network, as mentioned in figure 1, is a Radio frequency (RF) based wireless network comprises over tiny smart sensor and actuator nodes placed over or inside a human body [1]. Figure 1. Wireless Body Area Network WBAN has the potential use towards healthcare and entertainment. Body area network has been used towards Healthcare in number of projects where it collects the physiological signal from the human body using various sensors to measure the vital signs for health monitoring. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) can be essent ial in the doctor’s assessment for the patient which includes patient’s treatment, data access, proper medicine selection etc. For such sort of a system or a scenario like a medical system ultimately the most important is the data reliability during transmission and receiving process which include the security issues like authenticity, confidentiality, reliability etc. Before moving on to the further discussion of the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) this should be noticed here that a Body Area Network i.e. also called as BAN is a system of devices in near to the person’s body, this turns out to in a new standard as depending on the need of the requirements that we call it as a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) consists of more sophisticated and advance use of devices like sensor nodes, actuator nodes, personal devices etc. In reference to the above discussion the IEEE 802.15 Task Group 6 standard has been assigned to develop the smart or effective devices or applications for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) also known as 802.15.6 standard currently. The IEEE 802.15.6 is a latest standard. Some other standards are IEEE 802.15.11 (WLAN), IEEE 802.15 (WPAN), IEEE 802.1 (Bluetooth) and IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee). The first plan of IEEE 802.15.6 was released in May 2010 and the latest plan which is the third one released in April 2011. The reason of releasing the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) were the comparative matters in terms of range, data rate, power consumption, network scalability with the previous wireless communication standards. The main targets of the applications for a WBAN are divided into medical and non-medical applications. The medical applications focus on the gathering information of or from a patient continuously for the examination and analysis for the better treatment where as the non-medical applications emphasize on the monitoring of the lost belongings, data sending and receiving, gaming and social communication scenarios. As mentioned earlier the problem of security and confidentiality the levels of standards for the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) are categorized as unsecured. The security is in actual a process or a method by which the data can be sent from one end to another without the interruption or the hacking of the information. A security with the wireless application or the technology is an important issue because the ease of hacking or the changing of information in