Biosec: a biometric based approach for securing communication in wireless networks of biosensors implanted in the human body

Advances in microelectronics, material science and wireless technology have led to the development of sensors that can be used for accurate monitoring of inaccessible environments. Health monitoring, telemedicine, military and environmental monitoring are some of the applications where sensors can be used. The sensors implanted inside the human body to monitor parts of the body are called biosensors. These biosensors form a network and collectively monitor the health condition of their carrier or host. Health monitoring involves collection of data about vital body parameters from different parts of the body and making decisions based on it. This information is of personal nature and is required to be secured. Insecurity may also lead to dangerous consequences. Due to the extreme constraints of energy, memory and computation securing the communication among the biosensors is not a trivial problem. Key distribution is central to any security mechanism. In this paper we propose an approach wherein, biometrics derived from the body are used for securing the keying material. This method obviates the need for expensive computation and avoids unnecessary communication making our approach novel compared to existing approaches.

I. Introduction

Pervasive computing is an environment where people interact with various companion, embedded, and invisible computers. The objective of pervasive computing technologies is to enable a seamless integration of computing devices with the environment. This enables the environment to react to the user's computing needs without the user actually expending his time and energy. Use of embedded micro-sensors is an integral part of pervasive computing. Health care is a very important aspect of everyday life. Hence it is imperative that pervasive computing be extended to health care applications. Pervasive computing has the potential to provide low cost, high performance, and people centric solutions for health care, and monitoring. The rapid improvements in microprocessor and sensing material technology has lead to a development of miniature sensors that can be implanted in the human body. The biosensor based approach to health care makes it much more effective by reducing the response time, and decreasing the granularity of the application. By this technology continuous health monitoring of a human body and real time data collection would be possible.