Securing a body sensor network

Abstract

Health data is one of the most sensitive data available and its misuse can very easily endanger human lives. Ergo, each system and process in Body Sensor Network (BSN) which accesses this data needs to be secured well enough. In order to achieve this high security along with low energy consumption, a key management scheme named as Double Encryption has been proposed here. The proposed method uses two keys for encryption: a novel physiological feature based key and a pre-shared key between the communicating nodes. The feature and key generation, both are more economical than the existing algorithms in terms of computation, communication, storage, security and error. The features are exchanged with the help of simple addition and subtraction, instead of heavy computations like a vault or coffer creation, commitment, encryption or decryption. The another salient feature of the proposed algorithm is that if the key negotiation fails once, the protocol does not need to be restarted. The protocol is secure in various scenarios like Brute Force Attack, RCB (Remotely Capturing Biometric data) attack, Node Capture attack and Battery Depletion Attack.