Design and Simulation of Lightweight Identity Authentication Mechanism in Body Area Network

Jianglong Yang,Wanlin Yang,Li Zhou,Huwei Liu,Zhe-Li Liu

doi:10.1155/2021/5577514

Abstract

Wearable medical devices rely on the human body to form a small LAN around the human body, called body area network (BAN). Users can use these devices to monitor the changes of various body indicators in real time. The physiological data involved in this process belongs to personal privacy. Therefore, the security requirements of BAN are relatively high, and its current research focus is on authentication mechanisms. To meet the requirements of security and resource consumption of BAN, this paper proposes a lightweight identity authentication mechanism that meets the characteristics of BAN resource constraints. Based on the characteristics of BAN, a simple and mature star topology structure is applied to establish the network model of BAN. For the human body in normal situations and emergencies, the corresponding authentication mechanism and encryption and decryption method of physiological data are designed by using the physical unclonable function (PUF) and cloud database, physiological data, and cross-correlation algorithm. Furthermore, the formal and informal security analysis of the designed authentication mechanism proves that the authentication mechanism designed in this paper has certain security, and the lightweight authentication mechanism is simulated and evaluated. The experimental results show that compared with the benchmarking mechanism, the authentication mechanism designed in this paper solves more security problems and has certain advantages in terms of calculation cost, communication cost, and energy cost.

Highlights

In recent years, wearable devices are developing at an amazing speed, followed by intelligent and interconnected medical sensor devices and the popularization of medical sensor networks [1, 2]
With more and more medical sensor devices for monitoring and treatment on the human body, researchers have put forward the concept of personal local area network based on the human body [3], which is the predecessor of body area network (BAN)
By analyzing the communication model, security and performance requirements, as well as various existing authentication methods, this paper explains the importance of a lightweight authentication mechanism for BAN

Summary

Introduction

Wearable devices are developing at an amazing speed, followed by intelligent and interconnected medical sensor devices and the popularization of medical sensor networks [1, 2]. With more and more medical sensor devices for monitoring and treatment on the human body, researchers have put forward the concept of personal local area network based on the human body [3], which is the predecessor of BAN. E existence of the BAN and wearable devices enables individuals to collect their own physiological data in real time and monitor their physical activity and health status [6]. E medical sensor equipment deployed in the BAN collects physiological data of different indicators of the human body. If we do not take any measures, these data are easy to obtain, which may leak personal privacy and affect people’s life, work, and other aspects, so the research on the security of BAN is urgent

Methods

Results

Conclusion