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Energy-Efficient Key Distribution Using Electrocardiograph Biometric Set for Secure Communications in Wireless Body Healthcare Networks

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Abstract

Wireless body sensor network (WBSN) has gained significant interests as an important infrastructure for real-time biomedical healthcare systems, while the security of the sensitive health information becomes one of the main challenges. Due to the constraints of limited power, traditional cryptographic key distribution schemes are not suitable for WBSN. This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient approach, BodyKey, which can distribute the keys using the electrocardiograph biometrics. BodyKey represents the biometric features as ordered set, and deals with the biometric variations using set reconciliation. In this way, only limited necessary information needs to be communicated for key agreement, and the total energy consumption for key distribution can thus be reduced. Experiments on the PhysioBank Database show that BodyKey can perform an energy consumption rate of 0.01 mJ/bit with an equal accuracy rate of 97.28%, allowing the system to be used as an energy-efficient key distribution scheme for secure communications in WBSN.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the paper. We are also grateful to Prof. Riyi Shi and Mr. Todd Rickett in Purdue University, Prof. Husheng Li in the University of Tennessee, and Prof. Lin Zhong in Rice University, for their warmhearted advice and help.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Information System Security, Ministry of Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, People’s Republic of China

    Jinyang Shi, Kwok-Yan Lam & Ming Gu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, People’s Republic of China

    Jinyang Shi

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, People’s Republic of China

    Mingze Li

  4. The Open University of Hong Kong, 30 Good Shepherd St., Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Siu-Leung Chung

Authors
  1. Jinyang Shi
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  2. Kwok-Yan Lam
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  3. Ming Gu
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  4. Mingze Li
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  5. Siu-Leung Chung
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jinyang Shi.

Additional information

Earlier versions appeared in International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics (BMEI 2009) and International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN 2009).

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Shi, J., Lam, KY., Gu, M. et al. Energy-Efficient Key Distribution Using Electrocardiograph Biometric Set for Secure Communications in Wireless Body Healthcare Networks. J Med Syst 35, 745–753 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-010-9467-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-010-9467-2

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