Hash message authentication codes for securing data in wireless body area networks

Abstract

SummaryThere are numerous medical applications for the growing use of wireless body area networks (WBANs), including remote patient health monitoring, early illness detection, and computer‐assisted rehabilitation. WBAN links many sensor nodes implanted or affixed to the human body to monitor physiological data. WBAN technology has the potential to benefit medical healthcare systems tremendously. However, the gathering and transferring sensitive physiological data in an unprotected environment raises severe security and privacy concerns. The limited resources and broadcast transmission of a WBAN pose grave safety issues in biomedical applications. Keeping sensitive patient data safe during broadcasts is critical in the healthcare business. As a result of the massive memory and processing requirements required by traditional public or private key architectures, tiny sensor nodes cannot use them. WBAN sensor nodes can communicate securely using the KHMAC key‐agreement technique proposed in this article. Measurements and confirmations of shared physiological parameters at the transmitter and recipient sensors are key to the proposed protocol KHMAC before communication is established. The proposed KHMAC protocol enables sensors to use their prior session knowledge for secure communication within a predetermined time window. This will shorten the time it takes to establish a shared key, prevent the retransmission of extracted characteristics in the medium and eavesdropping attacks, and preserve the unpredictability of the key. Both the feature extraction and key agreement stages will be shown to have higher precision and lower error rates with KHMAC's proposed key management methodology. The proposed protocol is proven to be more energy and memory efficient than existing key agreement systems.