Securing body sensor networks: Sensor association and key management

Body Sensor Networks can be used to continuously monitor patients´ health. However, secure association of sensors with the patient and key management for providing integrity and confidentiality to the sensor readings are essential. We propose a secure discovery protocol based on the synchronised LED blinking pattern, to enable healthcare workers to authorise the sensor-to-patient association. We also propose a novel key distribution and management scheme that uses keychains to establish group keys for body sensor networks and caters for group key update and re-keying to adapt to membership changes. These protocols have been implemented to demonstrate their feasibility and an initial performance evaluation is presented.