An efficient and secure session key establishment scheme for health-care applications in wireless body area networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is special breed of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Due to the increasing interest and the tremendous advancement in miniaturization and sensor technology, WBAN has emerged as an active filed of research. WBAN has many unique applications especially in medical and health-care. This kind of network provides support in on-the-spot decision making and therapeutic treatments. However, one of the main issues with WBAN in medical applications is security and patients’ information privacy. In such applications ensuring human vital sign privacy and security is very important. To address this important issue, in this paper we propose a novel secure session key establishment scheme for WBAN in health-care domain to ensure security and privacy of vital sign related to human body. In the proposed scheme, session key is established for a specific period of time in order to communicate important data related to vital signs of patients’ health securely. Hence, on the basis of this reliable and secure data transmission, efficient required medical decision can be taken. As a result, on the spot health-care operation can be performed by utilizing different health-care units. The proposed scheme is dynamic in nature, i.e. if a node in the network is compromised or a new node joins the network, the process of session key establishment is re-initiated. The proposed scheme has been evaluated through extensive simulation, and the results are compared with an existing scheme. The simulation results show that our scheme is efficient and cost effective in terms of communication and computation cost, and key establishment delay, hence conserves energy and enhances security.