A honeypot system for wearable networks

Securing any information exchanged within a Body Area Network (BAN) from unauthorized tampering is essential to ensure that such systems are safe, and thus do no harm, to the people using them. Solutions for enabling information security in BANs require extensive use of cryptographic primitives that involve considerable performance overhead. Consequently, information security is typically not available in wearable technologies. We need adaptive security solutions that increase the level of security in the event of threats but otherwise impose minimal security overhead in order for them to viable for BANs. The first step in building adaptive security for BANs is to detect the threats. In this paper we propose a solution for detecting adversaries attacking the communication channel of a BAN called a wearable honeypot system. It works by communicating fake user health information between the base station and a set of designated decoy nodes in the BAN. Any alteration of this traffic, in content or arrival time, is considered adversarial tampering. A preliminary implementation of this wearable honeypot system demonstrates that it is effective in detecting a variety of communication attacks on a BAN.