Secure and reliable patient body motion based authentication approach for medical body area networks

Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) has emerged as a promising solution for monitoring patient activities and actions, and supports a lot of healthcare applications. A MBAN includes a set of sensor nodes deployed such, they can be located on, in, or around the patient body. They are used to monitor physiological signs, which are transmitted then to medical servers without hampering the patient activities. Security is one of the main challenging issues in MBANs since the data nature is highly sensitive. In order to ensure the reliable gathering of patient critical information, it is vital to provide authentication to prevent an attacker from impersonating legitimate sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a patient body motion based authentication solution. The routine activities, as walking or running, are characterized through a generic model allowing to identify the patient sensor nodes. Through the security analysis, we show its robustness against the well known attacks. In addition, we develop an analytical model to measure the impact of physical and logical attacks on the proposed solution with comparison to the existing protocols. We also evaluate the proposed solution through simulations with respect of important criteria, namely the transmission overhead, response time and energy consumption. The proposed solution demonstrates the best results in performance with comparison to the existing protocols. Furthermore, we have developed a prototype of the proposed solution, where it demonstrates promising results in terms of true acceptation and false rejection.