Information Theoretic Key Agreement Protocol based on ECG signals

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are becoming increasingly popular as they allow individuals to continuously monitor their vitals and physiological parameters remotely from the hospital. With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the availability of portable pulse-oximeters and wearable heart rate detectors has boomed in the market. At the same time, in 2020 we assisted to an unprecedented increase of healthcare breaches, revealing the extreme vulnerability of the current generation of WBANs. Therefore, the development of new security protocols to ensure data protection, authentication, integrity and privacy within WBANs are highly needed. Here, we targeted a WBAN collecting ECG signals from different sensor nodes on the individual's body, we extracted the inter-pulse interval (i.e., R-R interval) sequence from each of them, and we developed a new information theoretic key agreement protocol that exploits the inherent randomness of ECG to ensure authentication between sensor pairs within the WBAN. After proper pre-processing, we provide an analytical solution that ensures robust authentication; we provide a unique information reconciliation matrix, which gives good performance for all ECG sensor pairs; and we can show that a relationship between information reconciliation and privacy amplification matrices can be found. Finally, we show the trade-off between the level of security, in terms of key generation rate, and the complexity of the error correction scheme implemented in the system.

Secret-Key Agreement by Asynchronous EEG over Authenticated Public Channels

“…The closest in concept to our system is the system proposed in [44], in which the source of common randomness is the ECG signal, but without the presence of an attacker (Eve…”

Avaliação de Protocolos de Acordo de Chave Baseados em Sinais Fisiológicos para Redes Corporais sem Fio

“…Sabemos que protocolos que empregam sinais fisiológicos para definirem chaves secretas e compartilhá-las entre dispositivos tendem a atender aos requisitos desejáveis em uma WBAN [3]. Os sinais fisiológicos comumente utilizados em protocolos de estabelecimento de chaves envolvem o ECG e PPG [8]. Também é possível encontrar na literatura a indicação de que métodos de acordo de chaves que seguem primitivas difusa (Fuzzy Primitive), ou a primitivas não difusa (Non-fuzzy Primitive) podem ser interessantes [9].…”