Encryption by Heart (EbH)—Using ECG for time-invariant symmetric key generation

Abstract

h i g h l i g h t s• We explore the use of ElectroCardioGram (ECG) data to symmetrically encrypt data.• No previous approach has explored how ECG can produce symmetric encryption keys.• EbH creates on-the-y, user-specific, time-invariant keys using current ECG values.• 95.97% of unique keys, with up to 300 bits and 93.51 of min-entropy are produced.• Experiments are carried out over a dataset of 199 subjects along 24 hours.

Heart-Based Biometric Protocols: A look back over almost two decades

“…An in-depth analysis of LPC was reviewed by Makhoul [188]; 2) Chen et al [142] modeled the ECG signal as a dynamic system and applied a Lyapunov exponent's spectrum to extract the features of the signal to be used as a secret key in a cryptographic protocol. 3) González-Manzano et al [143] use a Walsh-Hadamard Transform-which is a special subclass of FTs, to extract information from the ECGs to be used afterward to encrypt data. 4) Bai et al [140] propose to use multiple features from the ECG to generate a secret key with the help of a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR).…”

“…Regarding the number of extracted bits, the majority of the surveyed papers extract 4 bits of information per IPI, however, this tendency is changing since 2016 in favor of extracting more information (see Table 4). Only a few authors [139,96,147,154,148] still extracted less than 4 bits whereas the majority of them [143,11,156,151,14,146] extracted more information from the heart signal (due to the use of WT and DWT delineation algorithms). In more detail, we found in the literature a wide disparity in this matter.…”

Feasibility analysis of Inter-Pulse Intervals based solutions for cryptographic token generation by two electrocardiogram sensors

“…As we try to be as general as possible, we use the 4 LSBs to generate tokens in our experiments. It is worth mentioning that although our work is focused on IPI values, which is the most widely used approach, some authors have proposed alternative solutions which work in a transform domain (e.g., [58] or [16]).…”

“…All the above has given birth to the so-called Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). In the last years, several works have focused on using the heart signal as part of either authentication protocols [8,9,10], human identification [11,12], or as a key generation algorithm [13,14,15,16] to enable secure communications. More concretely, authors use the Electrocardiogram (ECG) to extract the time difference between two consecutive heartbeats (R-peaks).…”

Stream-keys generation based on graph labeling for strengthening Vigenere encryption

“…Gayathri et al [13] generated private key by combining the advanced encryption standard (AES) and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Moosavi et al [14], [15] and Gonzales-Manzano et al [16] made use the feature of electrocardiogram (ECG) to construct secret keys. The interpulse interval (IPI) feature of ECG inspired the proposed two approaches.…”