Energy-efficient key agreement protocols for wireless body area networks

Abstract

Owing to the emerging demands of medical equipment nowadays, wireless body area network (WBAN) is imperative, while the vulnerable nature of wireless channel introduces various security threats and impedes its further development. Although a large set of security mechanisms have been designed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), few of them can be applied for WBAN because of its unique networking and communications characteristics. By taking into account the special design requirements, we propose a series of authenticated key agreement protocols based on a two-hop star network topology model, which may accommodate a number of different application situations. Both security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed key agreement protocols can preserve desired security properties with light computation and communication overhead. The proposed protocols provide a primitive to develop efficient and secure WBAN systems.