Power Attack: An Emerging Threat in Health-care Applications Using Medical Body Area Networks

Abstract

Recent rise in aged population and chronic diseases, is placing increasing pressure on health care expenditure. Ubiquitous health care is regarded as a potential driver in reducing such health expenditure. Advancement in wireless communication and sensor technologies permits real-time acquisition, transmission, and processing of critical medical information for ubiquitous health-care applications. Hence, medical body area networks (MBANs) emerge as a key technology to facilitate ubiquitous health-care services. However, energy restriction of micro-battery of a sensor device holds back the development of MBANs and also makes MBANs vulnerable to different malicious attacks. In this paper, we introduce a new attack entitled Power Attack exploiting power constraint of the sensor devices. Power attack forces a sensor to die off due to lack of power supply. Besides, we also propose countermeasure for the presented power attack. Finally, we exhibit efficacy of our proposed countermeasure using experimental evaluation.