Preventing Security and Privacy Attacks in WBANs

Abstract

Sensors and radio channels have made remote health monitoring easier with the use of wireless body area networks (WBANs). WBANs use bio-sensors, implanted on/inside the human body, to collect real-time health readings. These sensors collect data wirelessly and then send it to medical server via wireless communication channels. Human health readings are of great importance and wireless channels are not always secure. This makes security and privacy disquiet in WBANs. Sensor nodes are the most common target of an intruder in WBANs. Intruder can also attack the communication channels and medical server of WBANs. Therefore, WBAN needs prevention while sending sensed information to the health care monitoring system. We also need to maintain confidentiality while transmitting the data to the server. In this chapter, we discuss various types of possible attacks in WBANs and summarized different lightweighted security methods proposed for resource constraint WBANs. We thoroughly explained how channel characteristics and human body features could be exploited to identify intruder in WBANs without using complex encryption. Additionally, the chapter briefly review methods for generating symmetric keys and exchanging messages over insecure channels in cloud assisted WBANs.