TF-CPABE: An efficient and secure data communication with policy updating in wireless body area networks

Abstract

The major challenge in wireless body area networks (WBAN) is setting up a protected communication between data consumers and a body area network controller while meeting the security and privacy requirements. This paper proposes efficient and secure data communication in WBANs using a Twofish symmetric algorithm and ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption with constant size ciphertext; in addition, the proposed scheme incorporates policy updating to update access policies. To the best of the author's knowledge, policy updating in WBAN has not been studied in earlier works. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of message size, energy consumption, and computation cost, and the results are compared with those of existing schemes. The result shows that the proposed method can achieve higher efficiency than conventional methods.