PFKA: A physiological feature based key agreement for wireless body area network

Abstract

In recent years, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has emerged as a new technology which allows human body monitoring. Because of their enormous benefits, the use of this type of wireless networks is surprisingly increasing day by day and it has a strong presence in several domains. However, WBAN has many challenges yet to be resolved. Security is the most crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a novel key agreement scheme termed Physiological-Feature-based Key Agreement (PFKA) as a biometric based security system. The proposed scheme allows sensors belonging the same WBAN to agree on a symmetric cryptographic key generated from overlapping physiological signal features. On one hand, security analysis shows that our protocol can guarantee data confidentiality, authenticity and integrity. In the other hand, performance analysis show that our scheme reduces communication overhead in comparison with the other proposal protocol termed Secure and Efficient Ordered-Physiological-Feature-based Key Agreement for Wireless Body Area Networks (OPFKA).