An End-to-End Authentication Mechanism for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) ensures high-quality healthcare services by endowing distant and continual monitoring of patients' health conditions. The security and privacy of the sensitive health-related data transmitted through the WBAN should be preserved to maximize its benefits. In this regard, user authentication is one of the primary mechanisms to protect health data that verifies the identities of entities involved in the communication process. Since WBAN carries crucial health data, every entity engaged in the data transfer process must be authenticated. In literature, an end-to-end user authentication mechanism covering each communicating party is absent. Besides, most of the existing user authentication mechanisms are designed assuming that the patient's mobile phone is trusted. In reality, a patient's mobile phone can be stolen or comprised by malware and thus behaves maliciously. Our work addresses these drawbacks and proposes an end-to-end user authentication and session key agreement scheme between sensor nodes and medical experts in a scenario where the patient's mobile phone is semi-trusted. We present a formal security analysis using BAN logic. Besides, we also provide an informal security analysis of the proposed scheme. Both studies indicate that our method is robust against well-known security attacks. In addition, our scheme achieves comparable computation and communication costs concerning the related existing works. The simulation shows that our method preserves satisfactory network performance

Survey of main challenges (security and privacy) in wireless body area networks for healthcare applications

Abstract Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a new trend in the technology that provides remote mechanism to monitor and collect patient's health record data using wearable sensors. It is widely recognized that a high level of system security and privacy play a key role in protecting these data when being used by the healthcare professionals and during storage to ensure that patient's records are kept safe from intruder's danger. It is therefore of great interest to discuss security and privacy issues in WBANs. In this paper, we reviewed WBAN communication architecture, security and privacy requirements and security threats and the primary challenges in WBANs to these systems based on the latest standards and publications. This paper also covers the state-of-art security measures and research in WBAN. Finally, open areas for future research and enhancements are explored

Improved Secure and Low Computation Authentication Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network with ECC and 2d Hash Chain

Since technologies have been developing rapidly, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has emerged as a promising technique for healthcare systems. People can monitor patients’ body condition and collect data remotely and continuously by using WBAN with small and compact wearable sensors. These sensors can be located in, on, and around the patient’s body and measure the patient’s health condition. Afterwards sensor nodes send the data via short-range wireless communication techniques to an intermediate node. The WBANs deal with critical health data, therefore, secure communication within the WBAN is important. There are important criteria in designing a security protocol for a WBAN. Sensor nodes in a WBAN have limited computation power, battery capacity, and limited memory. Therefore, there have been many efforts to develop lightweight but secure authentication protocols. In this thesis, a computationally efficient authentication protocol based on Elliptic Curves Cryptography (ECC) and 2D hash chain has been proposed. This protocol can provide high level security and require significantly low computation power on sensor nodes. In addition, a novel key selection algorithm has been proposed to improve efficiency of key usage and reduce computation cost. For this protocol, ECC is used for key exchange and key encryption. The scheme encrypts a key with ECC to create a pair of points and uses this pair of points as keys for an intermediate node and sensor nodes. 2D hash chain technique is used for generating 2D key pool for authentication procedure. This technique can generate many keys efficiently and effectively with hash functions. For security part, this protocol provides essential security features including mutual authentication, perfect forward security, session key establishment, and etc., while providing high level security. In experimental results, this protocol reduced sensor nodes’ computation cost significantly by using combination of ECC and 2D hash chain. Moreover, the computation cost on the intermediate node has been reduced to 48.2% of the existing approach by the new key selection algorithm at an initial authentication. After the initial authentication, the intermediate node’s computation cost is further reduced to 47.1% of the initial authentication by eliminating synchronization phase. In addition, communication cost which is the total packet size of all messages is 1280-bits, which is 5392-bits smaller than the existing approach, for entire authentication and after the initial authentication the cost is reduced to 768-bits

Secure Data Aggregation and Access Control in Cloud Assisted eHealth Care System

Recently electronic health (eHealth) care system has drawn a lot of attention from the research community and the industry to face the challenge of rapidly growing elderly population and ever rising health care spending. The health care sector is also driven by the need to reduce costs while simultaneously increasing the service of quality for patients, especially extending health care to patient's residence. Advances in wireless body area networks (WBANs) have made it possible to monitor patient's physiological signals (such as electrocardiogram (ECG), blood oxygen levels) and other health related information (such as physical activity levels) in a residential setting or a mobile setting. Integrating this technology with existing 3G or 4G wireless technologies permits real-time mobile and permanent monitoring of patients, even during their daily normal activities. In such a heterogeneous wireless environment, we can use Ad-hoc network instead of traditional infrastructure-based wireless networks that can reduces cost of deployment, enhances network performance, increases the overall network coverage area as well as reduces the service cost. However, secure communication with data integrity and confidentiality in this type of network is a very challenging task due to different wireless technologies and subscription from various service providers. In addition, instead of storing the PHI at local health-service provider, the recent advancement of cloud computing allows us to store all personal health information (PHI) at cloud-storage and ensures availability with reduce the capital and operational expenditures. However, they also bear new risks and raise challenges with respect to security and privacy aspects. Stored data confidentiality with patient-centric access control is considered as one of the biggest challenges raised by cloud-storage used in eHealth care system. To address these challenges, in this thesis, we first identify unique features of the eHealth care system with security and privacy consideration. We then propose a light weight secure data forwarding scheme for the WBNs environment. A hybrid approach, integrated with public and private key cryptography was adopted to ensure the effectiveness of the scheme. Due to critical and real-time nature of the health application, WBANs also need to provide acceptable Quality of Service(QoS) in order to provide an efficient, valuable and fully reliable assistance to patients. Taking QoS as an evaluation metric, we study packet scheduling schemes for realtime transmission in WBAN and classified real-time and non real-time traffic to minimize the waiting time of eHealth application's data traffic. Secondly, we propose an Agent-based Secure and Trustworthy packet-forwarding Protocol (ASTP) for a cooperative mobile social network. In a cooperative mobile social network environment patient equipped with WBANs forms an on-demand adhoc network and use multi-hop routing to enhance network performance, minimize the cost of deployment, increase the coverage area as well as reduce the overall service cost. We use Semi-agent-symmetric trust metric, considering neighbor nodes' previous and recent activities and incorporate with proper security tools that enhanced the overall performance. Renewable pseudo-identities are used to ensure patients' identity privacy. Security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that ASTP improves the average packet delivery ratio and maintains the require security and privacy at the cost of an acceptable communication delay. Considering patients living in rural area, thirdly we introduce a delay-tolerant secure long-term health care scheme, RuralCare, for collecting patient’s sensitive PHI by using conventional transportation vehicles (e.g., cars, buses) as relay nodes. These vehicles are expected to store, carry, and forward the PHI to the health-service-provider located mostly at the city area following an opportunistic routing. RuralCare improves network performance by providing incentive to the cooperative vehicles, and encompasses identity based cryptography to ensure security and privacy of the PHI during the routing period by using short digital signature and pseudo-identity. Network fairness and resistance to different possible attacks are also ensured by RCare. Extensive security and performance analyses demonstrate that RuralCare is able to achieve desired security requirements with effectiveness in terms of high delivery ratio. Finally, to store patients’ sensitive PHI at the cloud storage and ensure availability with reducing the capital and operational expenditures, we propose a patient-centric personal health information sharing and access control scheme (ESPAC). ESPAC relieves the health service provider’s (HSP) additional burden for PHI storage, management, and maintenance by incorporating cloud storage services to electronic Health (eHealth) care system. ESPAC adopts attribute based encryption and assigns different attributes to PHI access requesters based on their roles and relation to the patient. To ensure authenticated PHI access with minimum computation, we further enhance the proposed scheme ESPAC as M-ESPAC by introducing multi-parties proxy re-encryption protocol. Light weight partial and block PHI audits make the M-ESPAC efficient to ensure stored PHI integrity and availability. Extensive performance and security analyses demonstrate that proposed schemes are able to achieve desired security requirements with acceptable computation and storage costs. The research results of the thesis should be useful for the implementation of secure and privacy-preserving eHealth care system with patient centric access control of stored PHIs

Reliable and Energy Efficient Network Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks

In a wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) various sensors are attached on clothing, on the body or are even implanted under the skin. The wireless nature of the network and the wide variety of sensors offers numerous new, practical and innovative applications. A motivating example can be found in the world of health monitoring. The sensors of the WBAN measure for example the heartbeat, the body temperature or record a prolonged electrocardiogram. Using a WBAN, the patient experiences a greater physical mobility and is no longer compelled to stay in a hospital. A WBAN imposes the networks some strict and specific requirements. The devices are tiny, leaving only limited space for a battery. It is therefore of uttermost importance to restrict the energy consumption in the network. A possible solution is the development of energy efficient protocols that regulate the communication between the radios. Further, it is also important to consider the reliability of the communication. The data sent contains medical information and one has to make sure that it is correctly received at the personal device. It is not allowed that a critical message gets lost. In addition, a WBAN has to support the heterogeneity of its devices. This thesis focuses on the development of energy efficient and reliable network protocols for WBANs. Considered solutions are the use of multi-hop communication and the improved interaction between the different network layers. Mechanisms to reduce the energy consumption and to grade up the reliability of the communication are presented. In a first step, the physical layer of the communication near the human body is studied and investigated. The probability of a connection between two nodes on the body is modeled and used to investigate which network topologies can be considered as the most energy efficient and reliable. Next, MOFBAN, a lightweight framework for network architecture is presented. Finally, CICADA is presented: a new cross layer protocol for WBANs that both handles channel medium access and routing

Lightweight Information Security Methods for Indoor Wireless Body Area Networks: from Channel Modeling to Secret Key Extraction

A group of wirelessly communicating sensors that are placed inside, on or around a human body constitute a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). Continuous monitoring of vital signs through WBANs have a potential to revolutionize current health care services by reducing the cost, improving accessibility, and facilitating medical diagnosis. However, sensitive nature of personal health data requires WBANs to integrate appropriate security methods and practices. As limited hardware resources make conventional security measures inadequate in a WBAN context, this work is focused on alternative techniques based on Wireless Physical Layer Security (WPLS). More specifically, we introduce a symbiosis of WPLS and Compressed Sensing to achieve security at the time of sampling. We successfully show how the proposed framework can be applied to electrocardiography data saving significant computational and memory resources. In the scenario when a WBAN Access Point can make use of diversity methods in the form of Switch-and-Stay Combining, we demonstrate that output Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and WPLS key extraction rate are optimized at different switching thresholds. Thus, the highest key rate may result in significant loss of output SNR. In addition, we also show that the past WBAN off-body channel models are insufficient when the user exhibits dynamic behavior. We propose a novel Rician based off-body channel model that can naturally reflect body motion by randomizing Rician factor K and considering small and large scale fading to be related. Another part of our investigation provides implications of user\u27s dynamic behavior on shared secret generation. In particular, we reveal that body shadowing causes negative correlation of the channel exposing legitimate participants to a security threat. This threat is analyzed from a qualitative and quantitative perspective of a practical secret key extraction algorithm

A survey on wireless body area networks for eHealthcare systems in residential environments

The progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to the base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments

Wearable Communications in 5G: Challenges and Enabling Technologies

As wearable devices become more ingrained in our daily lives, traditional communication networks primarily designed for human being-oriented applications are facing tremendous challenges. The upcoming 5G wireless system aims to support unprecedented high capacity, low latency, and massive connectivity. In this article, we evaluate key challenges in wearable communications. A cloud/edge communication architecture that integrates the cloud radio access network, software defined network, device to device communications, and cloud/edge technologies is presented. Computation offloading enabled by this multi-layer communications architecture can offload computation-excessive and latency-stringent applications to nearby devices through device to device communications or to nearby edge nodes through cellular or other wireless technologies. Critical issues faced by wearable communications such as short battery life, limited computing capability, and stringent latency can be greatly alleviated by this cloud/edge architecture. Together with the presented architecture, current transmission and networking technologies, including non-orthogonal multiple access, mobile edge computing, and energy harvesting, can greatly enhance the performance of wearable communication in terms of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, latency, and connectivity.Comment: This work has been accepted by IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazin

Is Blockchain for Internet of Medical Things a Panacea for COVID-19 Pandemic?

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of blockchain-enabled IoMT by introducing blockchain to incumbent IoMT systems. In this paper, we review the benefits of this architecture and illustrate the opportunities brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT. We also provide use cases of blockchain-enabled IoMT on fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, including the prevention of infectious diseases, location sharing and contact tracing, and the supply chain of injectable medicines. We also outline future work in this area.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure