Biometric-Based Packet Validation Scheme for Body Area Network Smart Healthcare Devices

Massive private and sensitive data flows between body sensor units and hospital medical servers in wireless body area networks. Any successful compromise of the transmitted data can have devastating effects, such as malicious automatic injection of drugs into the bloodstream. As such, it is important that strong security and privacy protection be accorded to the transmitted data. To this end, numerous protocols have been developed to offer the required levels of protection. However, a number of security, privacy and performance issues still remain unresolved in these networks. In this paper, a biometric-based packet validation scheme is presented. Extensive security analysis of this scheme is executed, which shows that it is secure under the Dolev–Yao (DY) and Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) threat models. In terms of performance, the deployed cryptographic primitives yield the lowest execution time, and smallest bandwidth requirements among other related schemes.