Body Area Network Security: A Fuzzy Attribute-Based Signcryption Scheme

Body Area Networks (BANs) are expected to play a major role in the field of patient-health monitoring in the near future. While it is vital to support secure BAN access to address the obvious safety and privacy concerns, it is equally important to maintain the elasticity of such security measures. For example, elasticity is required to ensure that first-aid personnel have access to critical information stored in a BAN in emergent situations. The inherent tradeoff between security and elasticity calls for the design of novel security mechanisms for BANs. In this paper, we develop the Fuzzy Attribute-Based Signcryption (FABSC), a novel security mechanism that makes a proper tradeoff between security and elasticity. FABSC leverages fuzzy Attribute-based encryption to enable data encryption, access control, and digital signature for a patient's medical information in a BAN. It combines digital signatures and encryption, and provides confidentiality, authenticity, unforgeability, and collusion resistance. We theoretically prove that FABSC is efficient and feasible. We also analyze its security level in practical BANs.