SEKEBAN (Secure and Efficient Key Exchange for wireless Body Area Network)

Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power microelectronics and miniaturization, and wireless networking enabled the design and proliferation of wireless sensor networks capable of autonomously monitoring and controlling environments. One of the most promising applications of sensor networks is for human health monitoring. A number of tiny wireless sensors, strategically placed on the human body, create a wireless body area network (WBAN) that can monitor various vital signs, providing real-time feedback to the user and medical personnel. The wireless body area networks promise to revolutionize health monitoring. Since the sensors collect personal medical data, security and privacy are important components in this kind of networks (WBAN). It is a challenge to implement traditional security infrastructures in these types of lightweight networks, since they are by design limited in both computational and communication resources. A key enabling technology for secure communications in WBANs has emerged to be biometrics. In this paper, we present an approach which exploits physiological signals (electrocardiogram (ECG)) to address security issues in WBAN: a Secure and Efficient Key Exchange for wireless Body Area Network (SEKEBAN). SEKEBAN manages the generation and distribution of symmetric cryptographic keys to constituent sensors in a WBAN and protect the privacy.