Secure Publish-Subscribe Protocols for Heterogeneous Medical Wireless Body Area Networks

Security and privacy issues in medical wireless body area networks (WBANs) constitute a major unsolved concern because of the challenges posed by the scarcity of resources in WBAN devices and the usability restrictions imposed by the healthcare domain. In this paper, we describe a WBAN architecture...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pablo Picazo-Sanchez, Juan E. Tapiador, Pedro Peris-Lopez, Guillermo Suarez-Tangil
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2014-11-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/14/12/22619
Description
Summary:Security and privacy issues in medical wireless body area networks (WBANs) constitute a major unsolved concern because of the challenges posed by the scarcity of resources in WBAN devices and the usability restrictions imposed by the healthcare domain. In this paper, we describe a WBAN architecture based on the well-known publish-subscribe paradigm. We present two protocols for publishing data and sending commands to a sensor that guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control. Both protocols are based on a recently proposed ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme that is lightweight enough to be embedded into wearable sensors. We show how sensors can implement lattice-based access control (LBAC) policies using this scheme, which are highly appropriate for the eHealth domain. We report experimental results with a prototype implementation demonstrating the suitability of our proposed solution.
ISSN:1424-8220