A Survey on Secure Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

Combining tiny sensors and wireless communication technology, wireless body area network (WBAN) is one of the most promising fields. Wearable and implantable sensors are utilized for collecting the physiological data to achieve continuously monitoring of people's physical conditions. However, due to the openness of wireless environment and the significance and privacy of people's physiological data, WBAN is vulnerable to various attacks; thus, strict security mechanisms are required to enable a secure WBAN. In this article, we mainly focus on a survey on the security issues in WBAN, including securing internal communication in WBAN and securing communication between WBAN and external users. For each part, we discuss and identify the security goals to be achieved. Meanwhile, relevant security solutions in existing research on WBAN are presented and their applicability is analyzed.

Secure Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications

“…In order to transmit data among communicating parties, they should share their secret key. To distribute this secret key encryption and decryption is to be followed [2].  Flexibility: Authorization to access the patients' data should be known on order basis to various care takers who are not essentially listed as being authorized.…”

“… Flexibility: Authorization to access the patients' data should be known on order basis to various care takers who are not essentially listed as being authorized. For an instance, if any one of the patient wants to change the medical center then it is possible to transfer the access control [2].…”

Energy-Efficient Protocol of Link Scheduling in Cognitive Radio Body Area Networks for Medical and Healthcare Applications

“…In addition, the security issue is a major factor in WBAN communication, which affects data privacy of individual patient [14]. For intra-WBAN communication, the data may be eavesdropped by the untrusted third-party or the attacker.…”

“…For inter-WBAN communication, the access control mechanism is implemented to different users according to their legitimacy and roles, which aims to protect patient data. The interested reader may refer to [14] for more information because we do not pay much attention to secure communication link in the paper. This paper is an extended version of our preliminary work in [11].…”

Analysis of Attacks and Security Requirements for Wireless Body Area Networks - A Systematic Literature Review

“…At the application level, security requirements include confidentiality, integrity, and authentication of the data including proper access control, accountability, and revocability. In [5], the authors detailed similar security requirements to [4], while also including protection against Denial-ofservice (DoS) attacks to ensure availability. In [6] the authors added the following attacks: replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack and collision attack for intra-body area network communication.…”