Enhanced end-to-end security through symmetric-key cryptography in wearable medical sensor networks

AbstractThis paper describes a security protocol and proof-of-concept implementation for wearable medical sensor devices that are deployed in hospitals. The sensor device measures the patient ’s vital sign parameters and sends them to the hospital server, such that the data can be processed and stored in the EMR (Electronic Medical Record) of the patient. The proposed security protocol is based on symmetric-key cryptography and addresses the challenges of anonymity, unlinkability, mutu al authentication and perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, it relies on decentralised authentication, avoiding an authentication server to be the single point of attack. Besides offering strong security features, the proposed protocol and implementation take into account that sensor devices are typica lly constrained with respect to communication bandwidth and computation power. Therefore, these parameters are evaluated in addition to the security analysis of the presented protocol. Our solution gives stronger security guarantees than related work, while featuring a comparable computation overhea d and the lowest communication overhead.
Source: Health and Technology - Category: Information Technology Source Type: research