How Key Establishment in Medical Sensor Networks Benefits from Near Field Communication Technology

A major design challenge for medical sensor networks (MSN) is to assure security of the communication links despite of the extremely scarce computational resources. From the security perspective, the establishment of trust during the initial key negotiation phase is a critical issue. The work presented is dedicated to the problem of initially pairing a network node with its sink. The proposed algorithm greatly benefits from near field communication (NFC) technology. Its small operating distance inherently introduces a close coupling between a node´s physical presence and its logical certificate. Important advantage is drawn from the hierarchical architecture of typical MSNs.