Security in pervasive health care using location-based key generation schemes

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on August 15, 2011Thesis advisor: Vijay KumarVitaIncludes bibliographical references (p. 41-45)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011Remote health monitoring has tremendous potential to improve quality of health care services in modern and ubiquitous medical environments. It helps to cut the cost in modern healthcare by avoiding unnecessary hospital visits for frequent checkups. In this context, security and protection of sensitive medical data such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), data integrity and protection of patient's privacy to be monitored are important aspects in order to increase user's acceptance of these new technologies. Secure communication protects data from unauthorized users and usually requires pairwise keys. In all existing schemes these keys are generated and distributed to nodes wishing to communicate. The key generation phase is usually well-secured but the key distribution is not, as a result, they are vulnerable to security threats. In this work, we investigate the key distribution problem inside a Body Sensor Network (BSN) and present two secure communication schemes which, unlike others, do not store a key chain in the memory from a universal key space and eliminate key broadcast. We have made the key generation phase relatively more secured with the use of location information. Authentication of biosensor nodes is also an important issue and has been taken into consideration in our schemes. Simulation of our schemes illustrates that they outperform some existing schemes and comparatively incurs less transmission and storage cost.Introduction -- Preliminaries -- Problem statement -- Proposed solution -- Performance analysis -- Conclusio

Security Issues in Healthcare Applications Using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks: A Survey

Healthcare applications are considered as promising fields for wireless sensor networks, where patients can be monitored using wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs). Current WMSN healthcare research trends focus on patient reliable communication, patient mobility, and energy-efficient routing, as a few examples. However, deploying new technologies in healthcare applications without considering security makes patient privacy vulnerable. Moreover, the physiological data of an individual are highly sensitive. Therefore, security is a paramount requirement of healthcare applications, especially in the case of patient privacy, if the patient has an embarrassing disease. This paper discusses the security and privacy issues in healthcare application using WMSNs. We highlight some popular healthcare projects using wireless medical sensor networks, and discuss their security. Our aim is to instigate discussion on these critical issues since the success of healthcare application depends directly on patient security and privacy, for ethic as well as legal reasons. In addition, we discuss the issues with existing security mechanisms, and sketch out the important security requirements for such applications. In addition, the paper reviews existing schemes that have been recently proposed to provide security solutions in wireless healthcare scenarios. Finally, the paper ends up with a summary of open security research issues that need to be explored for future healthcare applications using WMSNs

A Survey of System Architecture Requirements for Health Care-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a viable technology for a vast number of applications, including health care applications. To best support these health care applications, WSN technology can be adopted for the design of practical Health Care WSNs (HCWSNs) that support the key system architecture requirements of reliable communication, node mobility support, multicast technology, energy efficiency, and the timely delivery of data. Work in the literature mostly focuses on the physical design of the HCWSNs (e.g., wearable sensors, in vivo embedded sensors, et cetera). However, work towards enhancing the communication layers (i.e., routing, medium access control, et cetera) to improve HCWSN performance is largely lacking. In this paper, the information gleaned from an extensive literature survey is shared in an effort to fortify the knowledge base for the communication aspect of HCWSNs. We highlight the major currently existing prototype HCWSNs and also provide the details of their routing protocol characteristics. We also explore the current state of the art in medium access control (MAC) protocols for WSNs, for the purpose of seeking an energy efficient solution that is robust to mobility and delivers data in a timely fashion. Furthermore, we review a number of reliable transport layer protocols, including a network coding based protocol from the literature, that are potentially suitable for delivering end-to-end reliability of data transmitted in HCWSNs. We identify the advantages and disadvantages of the reviewed MAC, routing, and transport layer protocols as they pertain to the design and implementation of a HCWSN. The findings from this literature survey will serve as a useful foundation for designing a reliable HCWSN and also contribute to the development and evaluation of protocols for improving the performance of future HCWSNs. Open issues that required further investigations are highlighted

Emerging multidisciplinary research across database management systems

The database community is exploring more and more multidisciplinary avenues: Data semantics overlaps with ontology management; reasoning tasks venture into the domain of artificial intelligence; and data stream management and information retrieval shake hands, e.g., when processing Web click-streams. These new research avenues become evident, for example, in the topics that doctoral students choose for their dissertations. This paper surveys the emerging multidisciplinary research by doctoral students in database systems and related areas. It is based on the PIKM 2010, which is the 3rd Ph.D. workshop at the International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). The topics addressed include ontology development, data streams, natural language processing, medical databases, green energy, cloud computing, and exploratory search. In addition to core ideas from the workshop, we list some open research questions in these multidisciplinary areas

Emerging multidisciplinary research across database management systems

The database community is exploring more and more multidisciplinary avenues: Data semantics overlaps with ontology management; reasoning tasks venture into the domain of artificial intelligence; and data stream management and information retrieval shake hands, e.g., when processing Web click-streams. These new research avenues become evident, for example, in the topics that doctoral students choose for their dissertations. This paper surveys the emerging multidisciplinary research by doctoral students in database systems and related areas. It is based on the PIKM 2010, which is the 3rd Ph.D. workshop at the International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). The topics addressed include ontology development, data streams, natural language processing, medical databases, green energy, cloud computing, and exploratory search. In addition to core ideas from the workshop, we list some open research questions in these multidisciplinary areas

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security

Emerging Communications for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are deployed in a rapidly increasing number of arenas, with uses ranging from healthcare monitoring to industrial and environmental safety, as well as new ubiquitous computing devices that are becoming ever more pervasive in our interconnected society. This book presents a range of exciting developments in software communication technologies including some novel applications, such as in high altitude systems, ground heat exchangers and body sensor networks. Authors from leading institutions on four continents present their latest findings in the spirit of exchanging information and stimulating discussion in the WSN community worldwide