Abstract
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) play a vital role in shaping today’s healthcare systems. Given the critical nature of a WBAN in one’s health to automatically monitor and diagnose health issues, security and privacy of these healthcare systems need a special attention. In this paper, we first propose a novel four-tier architecture of remote health monitoring system and then identify the security requirements and challenges at each tier. We provide a concise survey of the literature aimed at improving the security and privacy of WBANs and then present a comprehensive overview of the problem. In particular, we stress that the inclusion of in vivo nano-networks in a remote healthcare monitoring system is imperative for its completeness. To this end, we elaborate on security threats and concerns in nano-networks and medical implants as well as we emphasize on presenting a holistic framework of an overall ecosystem for WBANs, which is essential to ensure end-to-end security. Lastly, we discuss some limitations of current WBANs.
Highlights
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have radically changed the way the patients are treated in this modern era as they are able to receive improved healthcare services
We investigate current trends in the security of a Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), at tier-1 and tier-2, which mainly include nano-networks and medical implants, respectively
Based on the communication of medical devices, we divide a WBAN into four-tiers, including in-vivo nanocommunications
Summary
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have radically changed the way the patients are treated in this modern era as they are able to receive improved healthcare services. Nano-devices will have extremely limited resources in terms of their communication range, processing power and memory, and storage capacities; on the other hand, the presence of a large number of these nodes inside human body will make it exceptionally challenging to propose communications and security architectures. A typical example of the out-of-band authentication in medical implants is the work presented in [30] wherein the authors utilize a low-frequency audio channel to transmit the key generated by a tier node utilizing a zero-power RadioFrequency Identification (RFID) device. A strategy to avoid DoS attacks in medical implants can be to detect the anomalous behavior that may automatically identify malicious communications and resource depletion For this purpose, some works in the literature propose to use physical characteristics of the transmitted signal such as received signal strength, angle of arrival, time of arrival, and time difference of arrival. The prevention techniques of different attacks at this tier still remains an open challenge
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