Physiological-Signal-Based Key Negotiation Protocols for Body Sensor Networks: A Survey

Body sensor networks (BSNs) are deployed around the human body to measure and process physiological signals in real time, which have wide application prospects in intelligent healthcare. Physiological signals measured and processed by BSNs involve individual privacy, thus security mechanisms must be developed to secure BSNs, and therein adoption of key negotiation protocols is fundamental. Due to stringently limited operation resources, BSNs require these protocols to be low-energy and highly efficient. Recent development has discovered that certain physiological signals can be used for efficiently negotiating common keys among biosensor nodes. These signals and fuzzy technology are used to design lightweight key negotiation protocols, and many solutions have been proposed. In this paper, we explore and classify these solutions, and evaluate their performance by analyzing their merits and demerits. Finally, we present open research issues that should be solved in the future.