Title: Energy-efficient key agreement protocols for wireless body area networks

Authors: Jingwei Liu; Qian Li; Rong Sun; Sawand Muhammad Ajmal

Addresses: Xidian University, South Taibai Rd 2nd, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China ' Xidian University, South Taibai Rd 2nd, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China ' Xidian University, South Taibai Rd 2nd, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China ' Paris Descartes University, 45 Rue des Saints-Pères, 75006, Paris, France

Abstract: Owing to the emerging demands of medical equipment nowadays, wireless body area network (WBAN) is imperative, while the vulnerable nature of wireless channel introduces various security threats and impedes its further development. Although a large set of security mechanisms have been designed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), few of them can be applied for WBAN because of its unique networking and communications characteristics. By taking into account the special design requirements, we propose a series of authenticated key agreement protocols based on a two-hop star network topology model, which may accommodate a number of different application situations. Both security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed key agreement protocols can preserve desired security properties with light computation and communication overhead. The proposed protocols provide a primitive to develop efficient and secure WBAN systems.

Keywords: wireless BANs; body area networks; WBANs; key agreement protocols; DoS attack; denial of service; normal situation; critical situation; energy efficiency; network security; authentication; two-hop star network topology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2015.072368

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2015 Vol.7 No.3/4, pp.266 - 279

Received: 15 Jul 2014
Accepted: 24 Sep 2014
Published online: 11 Oct 2015 *

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