AUTHENTICATED SYMMETRIC-KEY ESTABLISHMENT FOR MEDICAL BODY SENSOR NETWORKS

This study concerns security issues of the emerging Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) formed by biomedical sensors worn on or implanted in the human body for mobile healthcare appli-cations. A novel authenticated symmetric-key establishment scheme is proposed for WBSN,which fully exploits the physiological features obtained by network entities via the body channel available in WBSN but not other wireless networks. The self-defined Intrinsic Shared Secret (ISS) is used to replace the pre-deployment of secrets among network entities,which thus eliminates centralized services or au-thorities essential in existing protocols,and resolves the key transport problem in the pure symmet-ric-key cryptosystem for WBSN as well. The security properties of the proposed scheme are demon-strated in terms of its attack complexity and the types of attacks it can resist. Besides,the scheme can be implemented under a light-weight way in WBSN systems. Due to the importance of the ISS concept,the analysis on using false acceptance/false rejection method to evaluate the performance of ISS for its usage in the scheme is also demonstrated.