Resource-Efficient Security for Medical Body Sensor Networks

Abstract

Key management is a fundamental service for medical body sensor network (BSN) security. It provides and manages the cryptographic keys to enable essential security services such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication. In the medical context, the design of a key management service must be consistent with the strict operational and security requirements of healthcare as well as with the resource restrictions of BSN technology. The Deterministic Pairwise Key Pre-distribution Scheme (DPKPS) allows direct pairwise key establishment in sensor networks. We present a consistent key management service for hospital BSNs based on the DPKPS. We also describe a practical implementation specifically adapted to the strict resource-constraints of the popular MICAz sensor platform. Our performance analysis demonstrates that this key management service enables advanced BSN security services at an extremely low-power and low-memory cost.

Packet Scheduling by Buffer Management in MAC Protocol of Medical WBAN Monitoring Environment

“…It is an environment where the condition of a patient is monitored in real time by collecting various data from the tools or node transplanted inside or outside the body. In near future, the WBSN is expected to replace the conventional wired environments of medical surveillance or general monitoring system [4]. HMS (Healthcare Monitoring System) should implement Quality of Service (QoS) tools to ensure a certain quality level especially in terms of delay and packet loss as related applications require a very low or no data loss or waiting time for transmissions [5].…”

Secure ad hoc trust initialization and key management in wireless body area networks

“…In BAN, most previous works focus on security issues such as key management [Lorincz et al 2004;Morchon et al 2006;Malasri and Wang 2007], encryption [Lorincz et al 2004;Malasri and Wang 2007;Tan et al 2008], and access control [Tan et al 2008]. However, it is a non-trivial issue to securely establish a secure communication channel among a BAN and associate it to the correct patient before any data communication happens.…”

A Review on Body Area Networks Security for Healthcare

“…Another practical method is the deterministic pairwise key predistribution scheme (DPKPS) that has been implemented on the MICAz sensor platform. The scheme only consumes an extremely small amount of energy, 17.23 µAh, and memory space, about 2 KB flash memory and 69 bytes RAM, to compute and exchange a pairwise key between two sensor nodes [46]. Key predistribution is however relatively inflexibile as the biosensors will have to dispatch keys in advance.…”