Secure and Efficient Data Communication Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are expected to play a major role in the field of patient-health monitoring in the near future, which gains tremendous attention amongst researchers in recent years. One of the challenges is to establish a secure communication architecture between sensors and users, whilst addressing the prevalent security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a communication architecture for BANs, and design a scheme to secure the data communications between implanted/wearable sensors and the data sink/data consumers (doctors or nurse) by employing Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP_ABE) [1] and signature to store the data in ciphertext format at the data sink, hence ensuring data security. Our scheme achieves a role-based access control by employing an access control tree defined by the attributes of the data. We also design two protocols to securely retrieve the sensitive data from a BAN and instruct the sensors in a BAN. We analyze the proposed scheme, and argue that it provides message authenticity and collusion resistance, and is efficient and feasible. We also evaluate its performance in terms of energy consumption and communication/computation overhead.