AN AUTHENTICATION TECHNIQUE FOR ENHANCING SECURITY IN HEALTHCARE MONITORING SYSTEMS USING WIRELESS BODY AREA NETWORKS (WBANs)

Abstract

In Health-Care Monitoring (HCM) applications, the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) gives an important benefit for the subsequent evaluation. The development of a specialized biological network named Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) or Body Area Networks (BANs) are been provoked by the major advancements in WSN algorithms along with applications. WSBN is a kind of WSN, which is particularly associated with healthcare applications. In HCM, for checking the useful parameters exactly, the Biosensors Nodes (BN) are located above the human bodies’ surface or implanted into the human body tissues. Sensing a patient’s significant signs, processing, along with communicating data are the three important tasks presented by the sensors in WBANs. The human body’s essential physiological parameters like blood pressure, ECG, and pulse are gathered by BN. Through Body Sensor Units (BSUs), these biosensors collect physical data and for further assessment, the biosensor transmits the physical data to its final destination (personal display assistant, gateway, Base Station (BS). Since the WBAN collects the profits of continuous progress, it can save human lives by employing it not just in medicine but also in military applications and sports activities. Security together with privacy in WBANs based HCM services has constantly been a critical problem, even though WBANs enhance the value of health care services. However, any abuse of the patient’s sensitive health-related and personal information transmitted over an open channel could mislead the doctor to make an inaccurate diagnosis and treatment, which can lead to fatal reverberations to the patient. Therefore, it is prudent to protect the data sensed by the sensors so as to maintain its integrity, and prevent it from attacks by the adversary. Apart from this, the sensor nodes surrounding the human body and sensing the physiological data have inadequate resources iv concerning battery life, memory space, processing capabilities. Therefore, with the given resource constraints and issues of security and privacy in WBAN, it is necessary to come up with a stronger solution. In this thesis, a novel authentication using an identity-based group signature (IBGS) protocol has been proposed to provide security to the WBSN. This protocol uses an identity-based group signature algorithm between biosensors and Group Manager (GM) with full anonymity to authenticate the message. Here, the base station or access point is considered the trusted authority and it generates the secret key for the biosensor based on group id and transmits the generated secret key to the biosensor manager. The GM is responsible for generating a signature on the message that has been sent to it by one of its group members and broadcasts the message to the base station whether it is verified. Upon successful verification, the message is accepted. Besides, sound informal security evaluation has been performed to demonstrate that IBGS attains necessary security properties and is safe from sundry attacks. In the end, to exhibit the practical applications of IBGS, it has been compared with the existing related schemes and the outcome reveals that IBGS optimizes energy consumption, computation cost, packet ratio, average delay, key mismatching ratio, data privacy rate, and information loss rate significantly and performs efficiently concerning measurement of security on patient health information. Next, in this thesis, an energy-efficient secure data transmission mechanism is proposed in WBSN using a novel authentication id-based group signature model (IDGS) and Secret key induced Elliptic Curve Cryptography SECC technique. At first, the Group Manager (GM) is selected from the sensors in the remote body sensor system using Normalized Opposition Based Learning BAT Optimization Algorithm (NOBL-BOA). Afterward, clustering with Information Entropy induced K-Means Algorithm v (IEKMA) takes place to improve energy efficiency. Next, to provide security to the WBSN, message authentication is carried out based on novel authentication ID-based group signature protocol. the formal security proof for IDGS has been provided using necessary security properties. Finally, the SECC is used to encrypt the message for secure data transmission. In the end, a comparative performance analysis with other relevant schemes manifests that IDGS achieves better performance and shows promising results while providing more robust security, energy efficiency and privacy.