A Hybrid Security Mechanism for Intra-WBAN and Inter-WBAN Communications

Abstract

The emerging wireless body area networks (WBANs) have a great potential for the growth and development of future ubiquitous healthcare systems. However, due to the use of unreliable wireless media, WBANs are exposed to a variety of attacks. The prevention of these attacks depends upon the cryptographic techniques. The strength of cryptography is based on the keys used for encryption and decryption in the communication process. Security is still an alarming challenge for WBANs and needs attention of the research community. The proposed work introduces a hybrid key management scheme for both intra-WBAN and inter-WBAN communications. The proposed technique is based on preloaded keys as well as keys automatically generated from biometrics of the human body. The biometric-based calculations are of linear time complexity to cater the strict resource constraints and security requirements of WBANs. The proposed security mechanism provides an efficient solution for the security of both intra-WBAN and inter-WBAN communications. The results of the proposed technique are compared with an existing key management technique known as BARI+. The results show significant improvement over the results produced by BARI+ in terms of storage, communication, energy overhead, and security.

Key Agreement Schemes in Wireless Body Area Networks: Taxonomy and State-of-the-Art

“…PS acts as a gateway between the sensors located on the body and the outside world. All the data are routed from PS to the servers located at a remote hospital [14]. According to IEEE 802.15.6 Standard, the typical data rates range from 0.5 Mbps up to 10 Mbps with 0.4882 Mbps as the mandatory one.…”

“…An adversary replays the messages to drain the energy of the biosensors. Authentication and message freshness is used to prevent this type of attack in WBAN, where the freshness is assured by using Nonce [14,15]. Denial of Service (DoS)-A malicious node repeatedly attempts to join the WBAN, which prevents a legitimate Node Compromise-An adversary can exploit a hole in the system software of a sensor node to gain control of the node.…”

“…The scheme in [60] is classified as hybrid, due to the use of a pre-deployed bivariate polynomial share for key agreement and PVs to update the individual keys. Another hybrid key agreement scheme is presented in [14], where pre-loaded keys, as well as keys automatically generated from ECG of a human body, are utilized for the WBAN security. The scheme in [14] supports both kinds of communication architectures, i.e., intra-WBAN and inter-WBAN communication.…”

“…Another hybrid key agreement scheme is presented in [14], where pre-loaded keys, as well as keys automatically generated from ECG of a human body, are utilized for the WBAN security. The scheme in [14] supports both kinds of communication architectures, i.e., intra-WBAN and inter-WBAN communication. In [61], the authors store the public key of the base station in each sensor node before deployment.…”

ECG Arrhythmia Classification Using Mahalanobis-Taguchi System in a Body Area Network Environment

“…To handle this uncertainty of arrhythmia occurrence, the WBANbased architecture is proposed. The integration of WBAN will make the detection scheme ubiquitous and continuous [12][13][14][15][16], which will help in correctly locating the occurrence of cardiac arrhythmia. The end-to-end communication process [17] of continuous monitoring for cardiac arrhythmia detection using a WBAN environment is shown in Fig.…”