Efficient Group Key Management and Authentication for Body Sensor Networks

Wireless body sensor networks (BSN) are being used to continuously monitor the patient´s conditions and recovery progress. It is very important to secure the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of the patient´s health record in such applications. In this paper, we propose a novel key distribution and management scheme that uses keychains to establish group keys for body sensor networks. This scheme caters for efficient group key update and re-keying in order to adapt to membership changes. We also present a lightweight approach to enable sensor-to-sensor authentication in the BSNs. Sensors authenticate each other by computing a Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key between each other based on an authenticated membership broadcast received from the patient´s device. Both protocols have been implemented on Tmote Sky platform, analysed and evaluated to demonstrate their feasibility. We also shows the security analysis of the protocols using BAN Logic.