Using Bloom Filter to Generate a Physiological Signal-Based Key for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are often used to provide communication services for the data from the body. Since the data in WBANs are always closely related to individuals, they need to be kept secret with integrity. Key management is critical to data security. The resource-constraint biosensors make it difficult for traditional key management mechanisms to work well in WBAN. Using physiological signals to realize key agreement has the advantages of low overhead, timely key updating, and no key material predeployment and key store requirements, etc. The existing physiological signal-based key agreement schemes are always unable to balance the overhead and security well. To overcome these problems, we make two efforts. One is that we try to enhance the randomness of the interpulse-interval (IPI) from electrocardiograms in the process of digitizing physiological signals. And the other is that we attempt to use the Bloom filter rather than lots of chaff points to conceal the features exchanged for key agreement. The comparative analysis and experiments indicate that the proposed scheme can simultaneously achieve high security strength and low overhead. - 2014 IEEE.Manuscript received May 21, 2019; revised August 6, 2019 and August 27, 2019; accepted August 30, 2019. Date of publication September 4, 2019; date of current version December 11, 2019. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61872038 and Grant 61811530335, and in part by the Chinese Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 06105031. (Corresponding author: Xuanxia Yao.) X. Yao, W. Liao, and X. Cheng are with the School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China (e-mail: [email protected]).Scopu