Hybrid Authentication Protocol Framework Using Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for Multiple Concurrent Health Monitoring

Abstract

WBAN has shown great potential in improving healthcare quality through a wide range of applications in health monitoring. However, it operates in an environment with open access by various people, which also accommodates attackers. The open wireless channel makes the data prone to be eavesdropped, modified and injected. These threats can be extremely hazardous to the patients who need to be treated timely and accurately. Recently, studies have focused more on securing inter-sensor communication within a WBAN due to the resource-constraint issues of biomedical sensors. Therefore, this study proposes a hybrid authentication protocol framework to protect data transmissions between patients and medical professionals when the patients need to be monitored concurrently. The hybrid model uses Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal as the biometric parameter, in combination with a set of random numbers for greater performance. For greater accuracy, an evaluation is performed by using different sampling frequencies of the ECG signals as inputs to the model. The evaluation implies that the best-fit feature would be obtained by using lower sampling frequency of the ECG signal.