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

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

Wearable and Implantable Wireless Sensor Network Solutions for Healthcare Monitoring

Wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies are considered one of the key research areas in computer science and the healthcare application industries for improving the quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of current developments and future direction of research on wearable and implantable body area network systems for continuous monitoring of patients. This paper explains the important role of body sensor networks in medicine to minimize the need for caregivers and help the chronically ill and elderly people live an independent life, besides providing people with quality care. The paper provides several examples of state of the art technology together with the design considerations like unobtrusiveness, scalability, energy efficiency, security and also provides a comprehensive analysis of the various benefits and drawbacks of these systems. Although offering significant benefits, the field of wearable and implantable body sensor networks still faces major challenges and open research problems which are investigated and covered, along with some proposed solutions, in this paper

Energy-efficient design and implementation of turbo codes for wireless sensor network

The objective of this thesis is to apply near Shannon limit Error-Correcting Codes (ECCs), particularly the turbo-like codes, to energy-constrained wireless devices, for the purpose of extending their lifetime. Conventionally, sophisticated ECCs are applied to applications, such as mobile telephone networks or satellite television networks, to facilitate long range and high throughput wireless communication. For low power applications, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), these ECCs were considered due to their high decoder complexities. In particular, the energy efficiency of the sensor nodes in WSNs is one of the most important factors in their design. The processing energy consumption required by high complexity ECCs decoders is a significant drawback, which impacts upon the overall energy consumption of the system. However, as Integrated Circuit (IC) processing technology is scaled down, the processing energy consumed by hardware resources reduces exponentially. As a result, near Shannon limit ECCs have recently begun to be considered for use in WSNs to reduce the transmission energy consumption [1,2]. However, to ensure that the transmission energy consumption reduction granted by the employed ECC makes a positive improvement on the overall energy efficiency of the system, the processing energy consumption must still be carefully considered.The main subject of this thesis is to optimise the design of turbo codes at both an algorithmic and a hardware implementation level for WSN scenarios. The communication requirements of the target WSN applications, such as communication distance, channel throughput, network scale, transmission frequency, network topology, etc, are investigated. Those requirements are important factors for designing a channel coding system. Especially when energy resources are limited, the trade-off between the requirements placed on different parameters must be carefully considered, in order to minimise the overall energy consumption. Moreover, based on this investigation, the advantages of employing near Shannon limit ECCs in WSNs are discussed. Low complexity and energy-efficient hardware implementations of the ECC decoders are essential for the target applications

An architecture framework for enhanced wireless sensor network security

This thesis develops an architectural framework to enhance the security of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and provides the implementation proof through different security countermeasures, which can be used to establish secure WSNs, in a distributed and self-healing manner. Wireless Sensors are used to monitor and control environmental properties such as sound, acceleration, vibration, air pollutants, and temperature. Due to their limited resources in computation capability, memory and energy, their security schemes are susceptible to many kinds of security vulnerabilities. This thesis investigated all possible network attacks on WSNs and at the time of writing, 19 different types of attacks were identified, all of which are discussed including exposures to the attacks, and the impact of those attacks. The author then utilises this work to examine the ZigBee series, which are the new generation of wireless sensor network products with built-in layered security achieved by secure messaging using symmetric cryptography. However, the author was able to uniquely identify several security weaknesses in ZigBee by examining its protocol and launching the possible attacks. It was found that ZigBee is vulnerable to the following attacks, namely: eavesdropping, replay attack, physical tampering and Denial of Services (DoS). The author then provides solutions to improve the ZigBee security through its security schema, including an end-to-end WSN security framework, architecture design and sensor configuration, that can withstand all types of attacks on the WSN and mitigate ZigBee’s WSN security vulnerabilities

20 years of turbo coding and energy-aware design guidelines for energy-constrained wireless applications

During the last two decades, wireless communication has been revolutionized by near-capacity error-correcting codes (ECCs), such as turbo codes (TCs), which offer a lower bit error ratio (BER) than their predecessors, without requiring an increased transmission energy consumption (EC). Hence, TCs have found widespread employment in spectrum-constrained wireless communication applications, such as cellular telephony, wireless local area network, and broadcast systems. Recently, however, TCs have also been considered for energy-constrained wireless communication applications, such as wireless sensor networks and the `Internet of Things.' In these applications, TCs may also be employed for reducing the required transmission EC, instead of improving the BER. However, TCs have relatively high computational complexities, and hence, the associated signal-processing-related ECs are not insignificant. Therefore, when parameterizing TCs for employment in energy-constrained applications, both the processing EC and the transmission EC must be jointly considered. In this tutorial, we investigate holistic design methodologies conceived for this purpose. We commence by introducing turbo coding in detail, highlighting the various parameters of TCs and characterizing their impact on the encoded bit rate, on the radio frequency bandwidth requirement, on the transmission EC and on the BER. Following this, energy-efficient TC decoder application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) architecture designs are exemplified, and the processing EC is characterized as a function of the TC parameters. Finally, the TC parameters are selected in order to minimize the sum of the processing EC and the transmission EC

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

Data Protection for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (abbreviated: “IoT”) is acknowledged as one of the most important disruptive technologies with more than 16 billion devices forecasted to interact autonomously by 2020. The idea is simple, devices will help to measure the status of physical objects. The devices, containing sensors and actuators, are so small that they can be integrated or attached to any object in order to measure that object and possibly change its status accordingly. A process or work flow is then able to interact with those devices and to control the objects physically. The result is the collection of massive data in a ubiquitous form. This data can be analysed to gain new insights, a benefit propagated by the “Big Data” and “Smart Data” paradigms. While governments, cities and industries are heavily involved in the Internet of Things, society’s privacy awareness and the concerns over data protection in IoT increase steadily. The scale of the collection, processing and dissemination of possibly private information in the Internet of Things has long begun to raise privacy concerns. The problem is a fundamental one, it is the massive data collection that benefits the investment on IoT, while it contradicts the interest on data minimization coming from privacy advocates. And the challenges go even further, while privacy is an actively researched topic with a mature variety of privacy preserving mechanisms, legal studies and surveillance studies in specific contexts, investigations of how to apply this concepts in the constrained environment of IoT have merely begun. Thus the objective of this thesis is threefold and tackles several topics, looking at them in a differentiated way and later bringing them together for one of the first, (more) complete pictures of privacy in IoT. The first starting point is the throughout study of stakeholders, impact areas and proposals on an architectural reference model for IoT. At the time of this writing, IoT was adversed heavily by several companies, products and even governments, creating a blurred picture of what IoT really is. This thesis surveys stakeholders, scenarios, architecture paradigms and definitions to find a working definition for IoT which adequately describes the intersection between all of the aforementioned topics. In a further step, the definition is applied exemplary on two scenarios to identify the common building blocks of those scenarios and of IoT in general. The building blocks are then verified against a similar approach by the IoT-A and Rerum projects and unified to an IoT domain model. This approach purposefully uses notions and paradigms provided in related scientific work and European projects in order to benefit from existing efforts and to achieve a common understanding. In this thesis, the observation of so called cyber-physical properties of IoT leads to the conclusion that IoT proposals miss a core concept of physical interaction in the “real world”. Accordingly, this thesis takes a detour to jurisdiction and identifies ownership and possession as a main concept of “human-to-object” relationships. The analysis of IoT building blocks ends with an enhanced IoT domain model. The next step breaks down “privacy by design”. Notably hereby is that privacy by design has been well integrated in to the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This regulation heavily affects IoT and thus serves as the main source of privacy requirements. Gürses et al.’s privacy paradigm (privacy as confidentiality, privacy as control and privacy as practice) is used for the breakdown, preceded by a survey of relevant privacy proposals, where relevancy was measured upon previously identified IoT impact areas and stakeholders. Independently from IoT, this thesis shows that privacy engineering is a task that still needs to be well understood. A privacy development lifecycle was therefore sketched as a first step in this direction. Existing privacy technologies are part of the survey. Current research is summed up to show that while many schemes exist, few are adequate for actual application in IoT due to their high energy or computational consumption and high implementation costs (most notably caused by the implementation of special arithmetics). In an effort to give a first direction on possible new privacy enhancing technologies for IoT, new technical schemes are presented, formally verified and evaluated. The proposals comprise schemes, among others, on relaxed integrity protection, privacy friendly authentication and authorization as well as geo-location privacy. The schemes are presented to industry partners with positive results. This technologies have thus been published in academia and as intellectual property items. This thesis concludes by bringing privacy and IoT together. The final result is a privacy enhanced IoT domain model accompanied by a set of assumptions regarding stakeholders, economic impacts, economic and technical constraints as well as formally verified and evaluated proof of concept technologies for privacy in IoT. There is justifiable interest in IoT as it helps to tackle many future challenges found in several impact areas. At the same time, IoT impacts the stakeholders that participate in those areas, creating the need for unification of IoT and privacy. This thesis shows that technical and economic constraints do not impede such a process, although the process has merely begun

The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Health in Developed and Developing Countries

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2020, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in June 2020.* The 17 full papers and 23 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. They cover topics such as: IoT and AI solutions for e-health; biomedical and health informatics; behavior and activity monitoring; behavior and activity monitoring; and wellbeing technology. *This conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic