ESALP2: Efficient Signature Aggregation with Location Privacy Preservation in Wireless Body Area Networks

For Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), the security of sensitive data of patients is of the utmost importance, particularly in healthcare environments. This study presents a novel methodology for improving the efficacy of signature aggregation in a scenario involving doctors and patients while mitigating concerns about location privacy. Though there have been prior proposals for signature aggregation schemes, the proposed approach seeks to optimize the aggregation process within the considered scenario, thereby improving performance and reducing computational and communication burden. In addition, the proposed scheme integrates a resilient mechanism that safeguards the doctor's location privacy by utilizing the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). Advanced cryptographic algorithms and location-anonymization techniques are employed in the proposed method to safeguard the confidentiality of the doctors' location. The security of the proposed scheme is formally analyzed using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and formally verified using the automated software validation tool, known as the Scyther tool, and an informal analysis of various security attributes confirms the security robustness of the proposed scheme. The efficacy is evaluated in comparison to analogous works utilizing the Cygwin software. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has lower communication costs as compared to existing competing schemes. Moreover, the serving ratio in the proposed scheme is high even if the number of patients is low for doctors.