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

• 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: wireless body area networks (WBAN); attribute-based encryption; eHealth security and privacy; wearable sensors
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/14/12/22619

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.