Security in Wireless Body Area Networks: From In-Body to Off-Body Communications

• Main Authors: Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, Marwa Qaraqe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2018-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: WBAN; privacy; security; healthcare systems; remote monitoring; in-vivo communication
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8481660/

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) play a vital role in shaping today's healthcare systems. Given the critical nature of a WBAN in one's health to automatically monitor and diagnose health issues, security and privacy of these healthcare systems need a special attention. In this paper, we first propose a novel four-tier architecture of remote health monitoring system and then identify the security requirements and challenges at each tier. We provide a concise survey of the literature aimed at improving the security and privacy of WBANs and then present a comprehensive overview of the problem. In particular, we stress that the inclusion of in vivo nano-networks in a remote healthcare monitoring system is imperative for its completeness. To this end, we elaborate on security threats and concerns in nano-networks and medical implants as well as we emphasize on presenting a holistic framework of an overall ecosystem for WBANs, which is essential to ensure end-to-end security. Lastly, we discuss some limitations of current WBANs.