Lightweight Security and Privacy Scheme for Wireless Body Area Network in E-Health System

Low computational power of wireless sensors and the multicast form of transmission exhibited by WBAN make it susceptible to several security and privacy issues. Due to these, many security and privacy preservation approaches had been proposed to secure and preserve privacy of wearable WBAN systems. However, the inherent low computational power which characterises WBAN nodes made most of these approaches inefficient for the networks. This paper proposes a lightweight two-way but coordinated perturbation scheme for obfuscating both the identities and measurements of the sensor in the wearable WBAN system. The coordinated generation of perturbs eliminates security and privacy problems associated with reconstruction by the receiver. The propose scheme was analysed and its estimated speed was compared with five state of the art schemes proposed in [39], [40], [41], [42]. The results showed that the scheme outperforms these schemes in terms of computational overhead. The scheme was also evaluated by simulating the scheme using digital ECG sensors as WBAN nodes. The simulation results not only confirm the estimated speed but also showed that the scheme left no semantic pattern in the transmitted data. Keywords—Sensor network, Ehealth, Electrocardiography, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN).