Abstract
Biometric sensor/actuators communicating via wireless body area networks has surged wide applications. From seamless healthcare to driverless transportation, biologically inspired systems benefit with productivity growth, energy efficiency, user convenience, and cost reduction. However, their invasive nature raises concerns. Security becomes the urgent task to realize biologically-enabled systems. Biological phenomena, nevertheless, can also play a vital role to secure software. Recently, several biometric authentication protocols have emerged to verify endpoints, promising one-time key for premium security. In spite of bio-enabled security advances, lack of security analysis theories and tools causes uncertainty of their safety.
This paper pioneers an experimentation on assessing security of a well-established biometric authentication protocol. Using the gold standard in software reliability, the work exploits the attack surface leveraging path analysis. The test not only identifies security vulnerabilities in a system but also pinpoints those vulnerabilities at real risk to optimize resource allocation. The automated holistic examination of the authentication process reveals a weakness in the biometric authentication protocol at study. The attack map directs its improvement validated with reexamination. The work also studies the computational complexity of the protocol, thereby, recommends the key length suitable to biometric authentication for wireless body area networks.