A security suite for wireless body area networks
This addresses security issues for remote health monitoring systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing key management approaches for resource-constrained networks.
The paper tackles the challenge of data security in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) by proposing a security suite with IAMKeys and KEMESIS, which use randomly generated keys for each data frame to eliminate key exchange, validated through performance analysis.
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have gained a lot of research attention in recent years since they offer tremendous benefits for remote health monitoring and continuous, real-time patient care. However, as with any wireless communication, data security in WBANs is a challenging design issue. Since such networks consist of small sensors placed on the human body, they impose resource and computational restrictions, thereby making the use of sophisticated and advanced encryption algorithms infeasible. This calls for the design of algorithms with a robust key generation / management scheme, which are reasonably resource optimal. This paper presents a security suite for WBANs, comprised of IAMKeys, an independent and adaptive key management scheme for improving the security of WBANs, and KEMESIS, a key management scheme for security in inter-sensor communication. The novelty of these schemes lies in the use of a randomly generated key for encrypting each data frame that is generated independently at both the sender and the receiver, eliminating the need for any key exchange. The simplicity of the encryption scheme, combined with the adaptability in key management makes the schemes simple, yet secure. The proposed algorithms are validated by performance analysis.