Secure and efficient ECG-based authentication scheme for medical body area sensor networks

Abstract

Abstract In Medical Body Area Sensor Networks (MBASNs), the body medical sensors are deployed on or in the patient's body and communicate using wireless interfaces. This communication mode makes the network more vulnerable to attacks. An intruder can encrust in the network and eavesdrop, inject or replay medical data. The sensors must be able to exchange secure medical information of the patient. The security mechanisms based on biometric features allow to hide and generate keys to be shared among the sensors. In this paper, we propose an electrocardiogram-based authentication scheme for MBASNs, in which we develop a new mechanism of biometric feature extraction. This mechanism extracts with a high precision the electrocardiogram-based features and achieves higher efficiency of authentication among the sensors. Through the security analysis, we demonstrate the robustness of our scheme against attacks. Moreover, we demonstrate the reliability of our solution in terms of communication overhead and processing time with comparison to concurrent schemes.