Abstract
Security and privacy issues in medical wireless body area networks (WBANs) constitute a major unsolved concern because of the challenges posed by the scarcity of resources in WBAN devices and the usability restrictions imposed by the healthcare domain. In this paper, we describe a WBAN architecture based on the well-known publish-subscribe paradigm. We present two protocols for publishing data and sending commands to a sensor that guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control. Both protocols are based on a recently proposed ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme that is lightweight enough to be embedded into wearable sensors. We show how sensors can implement lattice-based access control (LBAC) policies using this scheme, which are highly appropriate for the eHealth domain. We report experimental results with a prototype implementation demonstrating the suitability of our proposed solution.
Highlights
The development of reasonably powerful wearable sensors and medical devices has stimulated research in wireless body area networks (WBANs) applied to healthcare scenarios
In the publish protocol presented above, session keys are protected through ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-Attribute-based encryption (ABE)), and messages are symmetrically encrypted
The security guarantees offered by CP-ABE and the strength of symmetric ciphers, like AES or 3-DES, allow us to claim that our solution does not put at risk confidentiality
Summary
The development of reasonably powerful wearable sensors and medical devices has stimulated research in wireless body area networks (WBANs) applied to healthcare scenarios. The WBAN is often assumed to possess the ability to connect with external entities, for example, through an Internet connection This would allow healthcare staff to monitor the patient remotely, continuously and in real time [1], even using automatically generated prognoses of the patient’s health conditions with methodologies, such as the one proposed in [2]). Apps running on the smartphone and other smart wearable devices provide an interface to access sensor data, which can be forwarded to healthcare staff using the smartphone Internet connection. It seems clear that a compromise of one WBAN node (e.g., if it is lost or stolen) should not put at risk other data or devices [1,12], but more comprehensive security models are needed. Data and services should be able to dynamically adapt to contexts, such as time, location or certain events related to patients, and this data should be correct, even under Byzantine node failure [1,13]
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