Secure Group communication in Body Area Networks

Body area network (BAN) is an emerging technology which receives significant interest recent years. Typical BAN applications include healthcare, military, sports and first-responder. There is a great need to make BAN data transmission secure, accurate and protected. This paper presents a two-tier secure group communication framework (SG-BAN) for BAN data exchange, file sharing and remote display. Secure communication within a BAN (intraBAN) and between BANs (interBAN) are supported. At the interBAN level, group keys are issued/revoked when members join/leave the group to ensure the security policy. At the intraBAN level, device keys and media access control (MAC) addresses are combined to secure communication within a BAN. The performance of the prototype is also presented.