Efficient fuzzy vault application in node recognition for securing body sensor networks

Wireless Body Sensor Network (BSN) is being developed with a continuously rising demand for personalized healthcare. Due to the importance of privacy and safety, the medical data transmitted in wireless BSN have to be strictly secured. Physiological Signals based Secret Sharing scheme (PSSS) aiming to automatically deploy identical secrets among nodes of BSN is considered as an important add-on security mechanism in BSN. By utilizing biometric characteristics of physiological signal, PSSS can be efficient and reliable, as well as free of third-party authentication and pre-distribution. In this paper, taking full advantage of randomness and similarity of physiological signals, an efficient fuzzy vault based method is proposed and demonstrated for its usage in node recognition of BSN. The process of vault creation is detailed, where a full 2-dimentional space with Gray code is specially designed. Results of experimental analysis show that the proposed scheme has an acceptable performance of recognition with low system load over the existing schemes.