Analysis of the applicability of Wireless Sensor Networks attacks to Body Area Networks

A Body Area Network (BAN) is composed by several sensors that may be implanted or placed around the human body, usually deployed for health-care applications. The sensors monitor one or more vital signs and communicate through a wireless network, allowing the patient to lead a normal life. Innovative health-care applications may be deployed using BAN capabilities, and therefore, security issues in BAN shall be carefully considered, since they may have a great impact in the patient’s health. Adversaries might create fake emergency warnings, prevent legitimate warnings from being reported, exhaust battery power, produce excessive tissue heating, among other attacks. While efforts have been carried out in the industry and academia to define security requirements in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), more work is needed regarding BAN. In this paper, we consider the differences between BAN and WSN, and examine a selection of known WSN attacks that may be used to damage BAN. We also present a stack based classification of these attacks, and we analyse the security impact of single-hop and dynamic multi-hop topologies in possible routing attacks. Finally, we review some security solutions and their cost in resources utilization.