Intrusion Detection and Prevention of Node Replication Attacks in Wireless Body Area Sensor Network

Abstract

Healthcare monitoring architecture coupled with wearable sensor systems for monitoring elderly or chronic patients in their residence has emerged as a promising technique. The wearable sensor system, built into a fabric belt, consists of various medical sensors that collect a timely set of physiological health indicators transmitted via low energy wireless communication (Zigbee) to mobile computing devices. In this context, Security of the Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) in Ubiquitous healthcare applications is a crucial problem because sensitive and personal medical information must be protected against flaws and misdeed and also in order to increase user's acceptance to these new technologies. Moving towards this direction, we analyze the data access security due to replication attacks and the problems caused by it. We propose a secure multicast strategy that employs trust in order to evaluate the behavior of each node, so that only trustworthy nodes are allowed to participate in communications, while the replicated nodes are revocated from the network.