Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are becoming increasingly popular as they allow individuals to continuously monitor their vitals and physiological parameters remotely from the hospital. With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the availability of portable pulse-oximeters and wearable heart rate detectors has boomed in the market. At the same time, in 2020 we assisted to an unprecedented increase of healthcare breaches, revealing the extreme vulnerability of the current generation of WBANs. Therefore, the development of new security protocols to ensure data protection, authentication, integrity and privacy within WBANs are highly needed. Here, we targeted a WBAN collecting ECG signals from different sensor nodes on the individual's body, we extracted the inter-pulse interval (i.e., R-R interval) sequence from each of them, and we developed a new information theoretic key agreement protocol that exploits the inherent randomness of ECG to ensure authentication between sensor pairs within the WBAN. After proper pre-processing, we provide an analytical solution that ensures robust authentication; we provide a unique information reconciliation matrix, which gives good performance for all ECG sensor pairs; and we can show that a relationship between information reconciliation and privacy amplification matrices can be found. Finally, we show the trade-off between the level of security, in terms of key generation rate, and the complexity of the error correction scheme implemented in the system.
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are becoming increasingly popular as they allow individuals to continuously monitor their vitals and physiological parameters remotely from the hospital. With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the availability of portable pulse-oximeters and wearable heart rate detectors has boomed in the market. At the same time, in 2020 we assisted to an unprecedented increase of healthcare breaches, revealing the extreme vulnerability of the current generation of WBANs. Therefore, the development of new security protocols to ensure data protection, authentication, integrity and privacy within WBANs are highly needed. Here, we targeted a WBAN collecting ECG signals from different sensor nodes on the individual's body, we extracted the inter-pulse interval (i.e., R-R interval) sequence from each of them, and we developed a new information theoretic key agreement protocol that exploits the inherent randomness of ECG to ensure authentication between sensor pairs within the WBAN. After proper pre-processing, we provide an analytical solution that ensures robust authentication; we provide a unique information reconciliation matrix, which gives good performance for all ECG sensor pairs; and we can show that a relationship between information reconciliation and privacy amplification matrices can be found. Finally, we show the trade-off between the level of security, in terms of key generation rate, and the complexity of the error correction scheme implemented in the system.
Reliable communication over Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is an essential aspect of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) because the physiological data flows between wearable sensor nodes is sensitive data. The convectional cryptography methods usually apply a lot of computational complexity as well as energy overhead besides which they are not going to fit in the ultra-low-power WBANs. In the current paper a light-weight, energy-efficient Physical Layer Key Generation (PLKG) scheme the possibilities of which based on the native randomness and reciprocity of the wireless channel is used to generate secure symmetric keys is presented. With WBANs, there is a lot of temporal and spatial dynamics in the human body and its surrounding environment, which causes great variability in channel characteristics, in terms of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and Channel State Information (CSI). Such physical layer parameters can be used as perfect entropy sources in generation of unique, unpredictable secret keys with whose knowledge, communication between nodes is possible and mutually exclusive only. The channel probing in the proposed framework is also robust, multi-bit quantization is performed adaptively, information reconciliation is performed through error correction codes, and privacy amplification is made through cryptographic hashing. We have developed a resilient system against bit mismatch and efficiently against passively eavesdropping, we guarantee the secrecy of the generated keys under adversary situation. With realistic WBAN models simulation and experiment validation shows that the proposed approach is capable of generating keystokes with very high key generation rate (50 bps) and a bit mismatch rate of lower than 3 percent as compared to existing schemes that solely relied on RSSI, making this protocol more secure and reliable to use. In addition, the framework meets the statistical randomness requirements specified by NIST and it does not leak mutual information to eavesdroppers. The scheme allows real-time use on resource-constrained devices, e.g., wearable medical devices and health-monitoring sensor, as it has low computational and memory overhead. The findings establish the feasibility of employing physical layer properties to achieve secure WBANs communication without any pre-shared keys or a centralized trust paradigm, thus, opening the way to scalable and privacy-preserving healthcare systems.
This study proposes a lightweight, reciprocity-driven physical layer key generation scheme tailored for secure communication in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). By harnessing the inherent randomness and temporal variation of on-body wireless channels, cryptographic keys are dynamically generated between wearable devices without reliance on pre-distributed secrets or computationally intensive algorithms. The protocol employs adaptive channel probing and quantization, followed by efficient error reconciliation and privacy amplification, ensuring strong key agreement even under mobility and diverse body movements. Experimental evaluations on a real WBAN testbed demonstrate high key generation rates, low bit mismatch, and resilience to passive eavesdropping, validating the scheme’s suitability for resource-constrained, low-power healthcare wearables. The results highlight the potential of physical-layer security as a practical solution for next-generation, privacy-aware health monitoring systems.
Abstract With the rapid advancements of semiconductor technologies and wireless communication, Internet-of-Things (IoT) based network has a wider range adoption in the smart city. The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a representative IoT based network designed to connect various wearable IoT devices, located inside or outside of a human body. The WBAN typically connects itself to the mobile network and Internet via the smartphones. But how to mutually authenticate the entities’ identities and ensure the data confidentiality and integrity during the data transmission over a channel have still been the most prominent challenge in the IoT based networks. To solve the abovementioned challenge, in this paper, we propose a strongly secure pairing-free certificateless authenticated key agreement (PF-CL-AKA) protocol with two-way identity-based authentication before extracting the secure session key for the smartphones and wearable IoT devices. Our protocol is provably secure in the Lippold model, which means our protocol is still secure as long as each party of the channel has at least one uncompromised partial private term.
The incorporation of wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in medical applications has increased widely in recent years. WBSN provide an effective way to monitor patients’ health data remotely, and they also help to maintain social distancing. Hence, data safety is the utmost concern for maintaining the integrity of sensitive data as these risks can lead towards the life-threatening conditions of the patients, as well. To maintain the required level of security, many traditional cryptographic measures are currently in use; however, they cannot provide the same level of security in the quantum era. Therefore, in this paper, an augmented BB84 quantum cryptography protocol is proposed for secure key generation and distribution between two participating entities in a quantum environment. In addition, to preserve the legitimacy of the users, a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) is incorporated into the proposed model. Through different analysis including security, key generation time, multiple error rate analysis, and performance analysis, it is evident that the proposed model provides prominent security against DoS attack, replay attack, quantum attack, and known plaintext attack. Moreover, the key generation time (ms) is reduced by 89.38% compared to the existing quantum key agreement scheme. In addition, it achieves an average execution time (ms) for evaluating the protocol at different error rates like 1%, 5%, and 10%, are 0.0198%, 0.0736%, and 0.0385%, respectively, for different key lengths (KB). This demonstrates the robustness, reliability, and security tolerance of the proposed scheme under varying channel noise and attack conditions.
The rapid advancements in miniature electronics, wireless networks, and sensor networks, and embedded computing have revolutionized all real-time application scenarios. One such most obligatory application at present is remote health care. This is made possible via Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), hopeful in remote health care and assistance. These networks carry personal as well as life-critical information of the users. Hence stringent security mechanisms are required to safeguard these data from intruders. This paper presents a high-level security mechanism based on quantum cryptography for WBANs. A brief comparison of its performance with the enhanced BB84 QKD protocol in terms of efficiency and time complexity analysis. The efficiency and complexity order of the proposed EB92 protocol turned out to be 29% and 2, respectively in contrast to the existing EBB84 which resulted in 42% and 2.86 of the same. Furthermore, the security analysis is done concerning the Time-shift quantum attack.
Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) have rapidly developed to allow real-time health monitoring and remote medical diagnostics with better patient care. However, due to the sensitive nature of the data transferred within WBSNs, more integrated security mechanisms are mandatory, especially against possible attacks by both classical and quantum adversaries. The developments in quantum computing may break the conventional encryption schemes, so it is very important to explore quantum-resistant systems. The paper proposes a new scheme for lattice-based high-security authentication in WBSNs. Lattice-based cryptography provides post-quantum security as it has inherent resistance against quantum attacks and assumptions about the hardness of the computational problem, especially the Learning with Errors problem and the SVP. The architecture proposed strengthens defenses against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, and eavesdropping attacks by authenticating and ensuring that a safe key exchange takes place and that data integrity is achieved. It analyzes the performance, security overhead, and energy economy of LBQC to make sure it is appropriate for such low-power, low-resource contexts. The experimental outcomes validate the applicability of this technique, highlighting how well it will protect WBSNs against attacks from methods developed by quantum computing, and, at the same time, the system will remain resilient and the data confidential.