A biometric security scheme for wireless body area networks

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are receiving significant interest as the next generation of wireless networks and emerging technology in the field of health monitoring. One of the most important factors for the acceptance of WBANs is the provision of appropriate security and access control mechanisms. Due to its nature in transferring the patients' sensitive data, WBAN has both classical and specific security requirements. In this paper, we survey such requirements and propose a new security scheme for satisfying them in WBANs. The proposed scheme deals with the overall network architecture, including intra- and inter-WBAN tiers, and proposes two mutual authentication and key exchange protocols for diverse WBAN environments. In our scheme, we use biometrics as one part of the solution for authentication and key exchange, and the simple password three-party key exchange protocol as the other part of the WBAN security. Our scheme meets security requirements along with energy-constraint considerations. We verify our scheme through BAN Logic. Unlike the majority of the existing security protocols, our scheme proposes a solution for entire WBANs communications, from biosensors to the medical server as a trusted third party.