A PUF-Based Indirect Authentication and Key Establishment Protocol for Wearable Devices

Microwave communication through the fat tissue in the human body enables a new channel for wearable devices to communicate with each other. The wearable devices can communicate to the external world through a powerful device in their network called central control unit (CU); for example, a smartphone. Some wearable devices may be out of the range of the CU temporarily due to body movements or permanently due to low signal strength, in a fat channel communication network. Such devices can connect to the CU with the help of their neighbor device in the same network. In this paper, we propose a protocol to ensure secure indirect authentication and key establishment between the out-of-range device and the CU in a fat channel communication network, via an untrusted intermediate device in the network. The proposed protocol is lightweight and resistant to denial-of-sleep attacks on the intermediate device. We analyze the security and the computation overhead of the proposed protocol.