ELPA: A new key agreement scheme based on linear prediction of ECG features for WBAN

In this paper, we propose a novel key agreement scheme called ECG Linear Prediction key Agreement (ELPA) with the properties of plug-n-play and transparency to secure inter-sensor communication in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). ELPA is a new physiological based key agreement scheme allowing two nodes belonging to the same WBAN to agree on a symmetric key from ECG signal features. The paper introduces the use of Linear Prediction Coding (LPC), which has always been used for a compression purpose, in hiding the cryptographic key. In fact we prove that concealing the symmetric key using this tool ensures high security level while keeping low computational complexity and communication overhead compared with the state of the art.