A study of attribute-based encryption for body sensor networks

Abstract

Body sensor network (BSN) is a network with sensors attached on different parts of human body to collect various vital signs for the purpose of healthcare monitoring. In order to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of these data fused at BSN coordinator which is a low power and computing mobile device, i.e., smartphone, Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is promising. This is because ABE allows fine-grained sharing of encrypted data. ABE provides differential access rights arrangement for a set of users such as healthcare providers and allows flexibility in designating the access rights of individual users over the encrypted data. In this paper, we study and analyze the suitability of Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption scheme (KP-ABE) and Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption scheme (CP-ABE) on BSN. Then we conclude that Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE) is preferable for designing a lightweight ABE for BSN to be implemented in low power and computing devices to fulfill all the security requirements. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.