Enhanced end-to-end security through symmetric-key cryptography in wearable medical sensor networks

Abstract

This paper describes a security protocol and proof-of-concept implementation for wearable medical sensor devices that are deployed in hospitals. The sensor device measures the patient’s vital sign parameters and sends them to the hospital server, such that the data can be processed and stored in the EMR (Electronic Medical Record) of the patient. The proposed security protocol is based on symmetric-key cryptography and addresses the challenges of anonymity, unlinkability, mutual authentication and perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, it relies on decentralised authentication, avoiding an authentication server to be the single point of attack. Besides offering strong security features, the proposed protocol and implementation take into account that sensor devices are typically constrained with respect to communication bandwidth and computation power. Therefore, these parameters are evaluated in addition to the security analysis of the presented protocol. Our solution gives stronger security guarantees than related work, while featuring a comparable computation overhead and the lowest communication overhead.