Abstract
In recent years, Body Area Networks (BANs) have gained immense popularity in the domain of healthcare as well as monitoring of soldiers in the battlefield. Security of a BAN is inevitable as we secure the lives of soldiers and patients. In this paper, we propose a security framework using Keyed-Hashing Message Authentication Code (HMAC-MD5) to protect the personal information in a BAN. We assume a network in which nodes sense physiological variables such as electrocardiography (EKG), electroencephalography (EEG), pulse oximeter data, blood pressure and cardiac output. Heterogeneous wireless sensor network is considered which consists of a powerful High-end sensor (H-sensor) and several Low-end sensors (L-sensors). EKG is used for secure communication between nodes as it introduces plug and play capability in BANs. The process is made secure by applying HMAC-MD5 on EKG blocks. Key agreement is done by comparing HMAC of feature blocks between sensors resulting in a more secure network. The analysis is done by calculating the entropy of keys and checking the randomness of EKG data using NIST-randomness testing suite.
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RFC2104 - HMAC: Keyed-hashing for message authentication
RFC2202 - Test Cases for HMAC-MD5 and HMAC-SHA-1
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Ali, A., Irum, S., Kausar, F. et al. A cluster-based key agreement scheme using keyed hashing for Body Area Networks. Multimed Tools Appl 66, 201–214 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-011-0791-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-011-0791-4