ECG-Cryptography and Authentication in Body Area Networks

TLDR

Wireless body area networks enable ubiquitous multimedia healthcare services, yet preserving the integrity and privacy of medical data over wireless environments in a resource‑efficient manner remains a critical challenge. This study proposes a novel key‑agreement scheme that lets neighboring BAN nodes share a common key derived from electrocardiogram signals. The scheme employs an improved Jules Sudan algorithm (ECG‑IJS) to establish key agreement for message authentication, enabling plug‑n‑play secure communications without key‑distribution overhead. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that ECG‑IJS achieves lower false acceptance and rejection rates than existing methods while also reducing power consumption, indicating superior security and energy efficiency.

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (BANs) have drawn much attention from research community and industry in recent years. Multimedia healthcare services provided by BANs can be available to anyone, anywhere, and anytime seamlessly. A critical issue in BANs is how to preserve the integrity and privacy of a person's medical data over wireless environments in a resource efficient manner. This paper presents a novel key agreement scheme that allows neighboring nodes in BANs to share a common key generated by electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The improved Jules Sudan (IJS) algorithm is proposed to set up the key agreement for the message authentication. The proposed ECG-IJS key agreement can secure data communications over BANs in a plug-n-play manner without any key distribution overheads. Both the simulation and experimental results are presented, which demonstrate that the proposed ECG-IJS scheme can achieve better security performance in terms of serval performance metrics such as false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR) than other existing approaches. In addition, the power consumption analysis also shows that the proposed ECG-IJS scheme can achieve energy efficiency for BANs.