Development and Simulation of Enhanced Key Management Scheme for WBANs

Abstract

The design and deployment of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have recently resulted from the use of sensors to measure the biometrics and movements of the human body. The development of such networks is imperative for modern telemedicine and e-health. Since WBANs are dealing with very sensitive information (i.e., medical data which has a direct impact on human life), security is an essential part of WBANs design. Indeed, key management plays pivotal role in ensuring security requirements in WBAN. In this paper, an enhanced version of a biometric-based distributed key management scheme is introduced. This scheme is designed for use in WBAN scenarios. It makes use of key refreshment schedules and distributes key management responsibility among all nodes in a WBAN in a fair manner. The scheme supports the use of biometric measurements to generate symmetric keys in WBANs via facilitating the work of biometric random number generators that can extract a random bit sequence from biological data to generate symmetric keys. A general description of the development of this scheme is given along with all phases of its operation. Furthermore, simulation results are presented with security analysis related to the resistance of the proposed scheme against some possible attacks.