Security in sensor networks for medical systems Torso architecture

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have become a ubiquitous part of the computing community, with applications ranging from health care to warfare, to pollution control, to the Mars rover. Key aspects of these sensing devices are the constrained computational and energy resources, and the communication security aspects. A secure communication between these sensing devices is a desired characteristic when it comes to medical applications, military and other mission critical applications. A trusted third party based architecture under which certificate authorities store the public-key certificates of participating hospitals and medical practitioners is a solution for security in tele-medicine, but this does not hold for resource constrained sensing devices. In this paper, we present a new Torso architecture distributed sensor network approach of monitoring patients as a more feasible, secure, and efficient sensor network mechanism in medical systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.