PUF-based Wireless Body Area Networks Security Technologies

Wireless Body Area Networks(WEAN)is a very promising research direction.By implanting smart sensors in patients or attaching them to the patients' body surface,doctors can effectively monitor the patients' physical condition.In general,sensors of wireless body area networks have features such as small size,low power consumption,light weight,and intelligence.Sensors of the body area networks monitor important patients' sign data,and can even directly influence and control the delivery mechanism and the treatment process.Therefore,the security of data and control links of the WBAN is very important.However,due to the limitation of the processing capacity and the battery capacity of the sensors,many security mechanisms based on encryption algorithms cannot be used in the body area networks.Therefore,researchers began to explore security mechanisms based on hardware features.One of these representatives is the "Physical Unclonable Functions"(PUF).This article mainly did the following work:1.A PUF-based secure communication protocol is proposed for sensors in the wireless body area networks,so that any pair of sensors can achieve direct secure communication with identifiable identities.Each sensor in the body area networks has a strong PUF.For each input stimulus,the PUF generates a response.The response of different sensors to the same stimulus is completely different.Therefore,we designed a set of secure communication protocols based on PUF which allows any two sensors in the body area networks to directly communicate without having to forward data through the BAN controller.This greatly reduces delay and energy consumption of communication.And,this protocol is also suitable for the dynamic network topology of the wireless body area networks.2.A set of authenticated secure communication protocols based on PUF for wireless body area networks' sensor groups is proposed,and the communication overhead of the lightweight group key management mechanism in this protocol is analyzed.In the treatment of complex conditions,doctors need to refer to multiple parameters to develop a treatment plan.Therefore,multiple sensors in a wireless body area networks usually need to form a group to share the data in the measurement and decision process,if the BAN controller must forward information in each sensor's data transmission,the scalability of this method is very limited.In contrast,if a sensor group in a body area networks can communicate directly,then a BAN controller can manage multiple body area networks at the same time.In order to protect the confidentiality and integrity of data exchanged by sensor groups in a body area networks,we use PUF to design a lightweight mechanism for group key management of BAN sensor groups.After analysis and simulation,the group key management mechanism can greatly reduce communication overhead.At the same time,we also analyzed the group key management mechanism applied to the body area networks' dynamic topology structure.3.We use the BAN logic(Burrows-Abadi-Needham Logic)to prove the security of the above protocols.The ability of these protocols to detect various network attacks was also analyzed.Due to the limited battery capacity of body area network sensors,our security protocols must evaluate the energy consumption carefully.We use the power consumption of the wireless sensor's safe operation actually measured by other research groups as input data to evaluate the energy consumption of the new protocols.Since our security protocols does not require the addition hardware to implement nor does it require symmetric or asymmetric cryptographic operations,using only hash functions results in extremely limited calculation and transmission loads.Therefore,it is very suitable for applying in resource-intensive WBAN.