Pragmatic authenticated key agreement for IEEE Std 802.15.6

Abstract

The IEEE Std 802.15.6 is the latest international standard for Wireless Body Area Networks. The security of communication in this standard is based upon four elliptic-curve-based key agreement protocols. These protocols have been shown to exhibit serious security vulnerabilities but surprisingly, do not provision any privacy guarantees. To date, no suitable key agreement protocol has been proposed which fulfills all the requisite objectives for IEEE Std 802.15.6. In this paper, two key agreement protocols are presented which, in addition to being efficient and provisioning advance security properties, also offer the essential privacy attributes of anonymity and unlinkability. We develop a formal security and privacy model in an appropriate complexity-theoretic framework and prove the proposed protocols secure in this model.