Lightweight security protocol for health monitoring in Ambient Assisted Living environment

Abstract

Security is one of the major challenges that affect the deployment of the biosensors that form Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs). However, the implementation of any security protocol will result in the introduction of additional functional blocks to the device, which invariably lead to an increase in power consumption and processing delay. Both aspects are of critical importance to biosensor nodes in WBSNs as they tend to have limited power and need to have real-time processing capabilities. In this paper, a lightweight security protocol is presented to secure the medical information transmitted from the biosensor to the gateway. The proposed security protocol relies on a counter method at the biosensor side, which implements several security techniques at the biosensor side such as the nonce, hash, and public key encryption in order to minimize the consumption of biosensor's power needed for security operations. The security protocol comes with acceptable low computation overhead and hence results in minimal processing delay. Therefore, the proposed protocol, as compared with that of other existing ones, can be used for real time sensing and transmission of medical data.