Body Area Networks (BANs) are expected to play a major role in patient health monitoring in the near future. Providing an efficient key agreement with the prosperities of plugn-play and transparency to support secure inter-sensor communications is critical especially during the stages of network initialization and reconfiguration. In this paper, we present a novel key agreement scheme termed Ordered-Physiological-Feature-based Key Agreement (OPFKA), which allows two sensors belonging to the same BAN to agree on a symmetric cryptographic key generated from the overlapping physiological signal features, thus avoiding the pre-distribution of keying materials among the sensors embedded in the same human body. The secret features computed from the same physiological signal at different parts of the body by different sensors exhibit some overlap but they are not completely identical. To overcome this challenge, we detail a computationally efficient protocol to securely transfer the secret features of one sensor to another such that two sensors can easily identify the overlapping ones. This protocol possesses many nice features such as the resistance against brute force attacks. Experimental results indicate that OPFKA is secure, efficient, and feasible. Compared with the state-of-the-art PSKA protocol, OPFKA achieves a higher level of security at a lower computational overhead.Index Terms-Body Area Networks (BANs); secure intersensor communications; Inter-Pulse-Interval (IPI); physiological feature based key agreement.
Body Area Networks (BANs) are expected to play a major role in the field of patient-health monitoring in the near future. While it is vital to support secure BAN access to address the obvious safety and privacy concerns, it is equally important to maintain the elasticity of such security measures. For example, elasticity is required to ensure that first-aid personnel have access to critical information stored in a BAN in emergent situations. The inherent tradeoff between security and elasticity calls for the design of novel security mechanisms for BANs.In this paper, we develop the Fuzzy Attribute-Based Signcryption (FABSC), a novel security mechanism that makes a proper tradeoff between security and elasticity. FABSC leverages fuzzy Attribute-based encryption to enable data encryption, access control, and digital signature for a patient's medical information in a BAN. It combines digital signatures and encryption, and provides confidentiality, authenticity, unforgeability, and collusion resistance. We theoretically prove that FABSC is efficient and feasible. We also analyze its security level in practical BANs.
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