Defending against Internal Attacks in Healthcare-Based WSNs.

Zhe Wei,Wancheng Ma,Shuyan Yu

doi:10.1155/2021/2081246

Abstract

In view of the spatiotemporal limitations of traditional healthcare services, the use of wireless communication has become one of the main development directions for the medical system. Compared with the traditional methods, applying the potential and benefits of the wireless sensor networks has more advantages such as low cost, simplicity, and flexible data acquisition. However, due to the limited resources of the individual wireless sensor nodes, traditional security solutions for defending against internal attacks cannot be directly used in healthcare based wireless sensor networks. To address this issue, a negative binomial distribution trust with energy consideration is proposed in this study. The proposed method is lightweight and suitable to be operated on the individual healthcare sensors. Simulations show that it can effectively deal with the internal attacks while taking the energy saving into consideration.

Highlights

In the healthcare and medical field, due to the small size of individual sensor nodes in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the adoption of wireless communication technology, compared with fixed healthcare equipment, these sensor nodes have the advantages of portability, realtime monitoring, and ease of positioning, so they can be used for remote health monitoring, first aid, etiological diagnosis, drug management, and other healthcare needs [1, 2]
(1) Sensor node itself is limited in computing power, storage space, communication bandwidth, and power supply, and usually large amounts of healthcare related data needs exchanging between these sensor nodes. erefore, if complex encryption algorithms and protocols are used in the security solutions, even if they can be implemented on the individual nodes, their operation will accelerate the energy consumption of nodes and shorten their normal services
To address the above security and energy issues for the healthcare based WSNs, a negative binomial distribution trust with energy consideration is proposed in this study

Summary

Introduction

In the healthcare and medical field, due to the small size of individual sensor nodes in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the adoption of wireless communication technology, compared with fixed healthcare equipment, these sensor nodes have the advantages of portability, realtime monitoring, and ease of positioning, so they can be used for remote health monitoring, first aid, etiological diagnosis, drug management, and other healthcare needs [1, 2]. Due to the limitations of energy consumption, storage, and processing capacity of the individual wireless sensor nodes, some security technologies currently used in wired networks or traditional wireless networks cannot be directly applied to healthcare based WSNs. erefore, it is necessary to develop new security technologies or modify existing security mechanisms to make them suitable for such networks. To address the above security and energy issues for the healthcare based WSNs, a negative binomial distribution trust with energy consideration is proposed in this study. Compared with traditional trust methods, the proposed method is lightweight and suitable to be operated on the individual healthcare sensors, and it can effectively deal with the internal attacks such as the selective forwarding attack. This paper gives an overview of reputation and the trust mechanism in WSNs, which is an important supplementary tool for the network security. Conclusions are drawn and future study is pointed out

Background

Reputation and Trust Mechanism

Simulations

Conclusions