Abstract
A wireless body area network (WBAN) is a wireless network of wearable computing devices. WBAN's application domains include healthcare, sports, entertainment, military, etc.. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless medium, WBANs are vulnerable to multiple types of security attacks, which may limit their wide deployment. To address the security issues, developing a practical and efficient security scheme with the consideration of the balance among security, efficiency, and practicality is essential. Unlike traditional approaches (e.g., biometric-based approaches), we proposed physical layer Received Signal Strength (RSSI) based security methods that deal with several critical challenges in the deployment of secure WBAN systems. These challenges include: (1) The inaccuracy of determining nodes' location using RSSI measurement for node authentication; (2) The instability and variation of the RSSI reciprocity-based security key generation rates during key generation process; (3) The WBAN performance degradation due to key agreement (i.e., removing differences in symmetric keys); (4) The complicated security operations. In this work, I proposed integrated security solutions, which include cooperative node authentication, group-based cooperative key generation, efficient key agreement and simplified security operations. Both simulation and experimental results show that the proposed solutions will significantly improve the security performance, efficiency and practicability of a WBAN system.