Addressing the Confidentiality and Integrity of Assistive Care Loop Framework Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In-house healthcare monitoring applications are continuous time-critical applications often built upon Body Area Wireless Sensor Networks (BAWSNs). Our Assistive Care Loop Framework (ACLF) is an in-house healthcare application capable of monitoring the health conditions of aged/patients over a dedicated period of time by deploying the BAWSN as the monitoring component. However, the wireless medium used in the BAWSN for communications is prone to vulnerabilities that could open a door to attackers tampering with or compromising the user's data privacy. Hence, it is imperative to maintain the privacy and integrity of the data to gain the confidence and hence, the acceptance of the users of the healthcare applications. Furthermore, in time-critical applications, the vital health conditions must be monitored at regular intervals within their specified critical time. Therefore, the security model proposed for the BAWSN must not incur undue overheads when meeting the critical time requirements of the application. In this paper, we propose and implement a secure adaptive triple-key scheme (aTKS) for the BAWSN to achieve the privacy and integrity of the monitored data with minimal overheads. We then present the performance results of our scheme for the BAWSN, using real-time test-bed implementations and simulations.