Research Article
a
August
2018
Computer Science and Software Engineering
ISSN: 2277-128X (Volume-8, Issue-8)
Importance of WBAN and Its Security: An Overview
Mohammed Ali Kamoona, Ahmed AzzaziComputer Science Department, Applied Science Private University, Amman, Jordan [email protected], [email protected]
Abstract— modern day technology met a huge development in the aspect of internet based applications and distributed computations over the communication networks, thus leading it to a huge advancement and increasing the usage of many systems that serves of human life’s needs. Our main scoop is the e-health application that is served via using wireless body area networks (WBAN).WBAN is one of the systems that was developed in order to serve human health care situation, via providing a real-time patient health status, monitoring, receiving and sending health data with a medical server, while keeping the patient at his natural environment like staying at home or anywhere else in his everyday life. In this work we have given an overview of the security requirements and mechanisms used to secure the WBAN system and its data. As the data represent a critical values and it have a very sensitive characteristics effecting human lives directly, thus it must be well protected and strongly secured before sharing it over a network. While, keeping in mind system availability at all times with a high reliability specifications.
Keywords— WBAN, health care, e-health applications security, body area network, e-health applications.
I. INTRODUCTION
Through the recent advancements in modern day technology as well as the huge growth of the services and applications provided throughout the internet networks and servers, it was important to utilize that progress to serve human lives thru providing a better solution for health care services. Thus, the electronic health care was made to serve such purpose, the system have many health care applications and it’s known as e-health system [1].
Furthermore, using such technology will be able to provide a better health care situation for the patient’s every day status, by making an enhanced way of monitoring and taking care of patients in their own natural environment such as their homes or anywhere else in every day’s life. Also, the using the wireless technology will be able to provide an improved real-time monitoring in the future [2].
Being said that, wireless area network (WBAN) consists of a number of sensors that are either implanted inside the patient’s body or wearable gadget for example a heart monitor watch, in order to measure that person’s health stats. Additionally, it is important to mention here that sensors must be constructed by considering the following features: light Wight, small size, optimum power consumption, and low cost [3]. Moreover, the sensors are called nodes in the system and they are connected to a getaway, the gateway will be responsible being a connector to the network, helping to transfer data to medical server and store it in the patient’s file [4]. It is important to mention that, WBAN is considered one of the still emerging technologies under its progress phases and it is under an early stage of development, and it is expected to be one day a very stable system used in the health care applications [5, 6].
ISSN(E): 2277-128X, ISSN(P): 2277-6451, pp. 30-34
As, WBAN development anticipated to be able to achieve more aspects of security for instance reliability, flexibility, security, integrity and diagnoses accuracy in the way that the patient is treated [7]. Besides, such system of wireless monitoring capabilities could be also useful for the case of solder monitoring in the battlefield during wars which is a very dangerous environment by benefiting from remote access, also it could be used with any kind of life threatening situations with no need to direct human interaction [8]. Below we demonstrate the layout of sensors that are attached to the human body in figure 1.
Besides, WBAN has a number of communications standers that are held to achieve spot-on communication between the system nodes and the server, standers are set by IEEE which are IEEE 802.11 that constructed for Wi-Fi/WLAN communications which is considered a low tier of communications, while the second standard is the IEEE 802.15.1 that was set for Bluetooth communications that is also a low tier, ad hoc, and terrestrial , as It is a low cost communication channel that can maintain a range of about 100 meters long[9]. Whereas, the third standard is the IEEE 802.15.4 which is constructed for ZigBee that is similar to Bluetooth connection, also have a low tier, ad hoc and terrestrial[10]. Finally, the last standard to mention here is IEEE latest standard for WNAB communications is the IEEE 802.15.6 it is elusive, but some of the available information points to some kind of wireless Body Area Network (BAN) [11]. It is possible that it is meant to be the WBAN Study Group Medical Body Area Networks (SG-MBAN), but that group have not yet released any standards. Therefore, there are many studies concerning these standards and the way that can be improved thus also improving the WBAN system performance even further [12].
Still, as the WBAN plays an effective and vital role in the human lives by interacting with their health stats directly, it is very important here to make that system
Realize the proper security mechanisms and offer a secure data transmutation from the source (patient sensors) to the destination (health care system) and vice versa. Also, store them in a secure database of the health care provider. As, this data has been a victim of many attacks throughout the years like when an attack occurred in both USA and Germany in 2013 for example [13]. So, this data manipulation could lead to a catastrophic events such as the death of the patient upon changing some medical value like there amount of drug the use because any change of the medical daily does could led to a life threating situation. Thus, making the security a very important aspect to consider and it must be included in the WBAN applications [14, 15].
Beyond that, The WBAN security system must achieve some aspects that should be considered in order to construct it properly such as efficiency (where sensor nodes are computationally weak and limited), scalability (as the system have a large number of users and devices that are growing more and more), and usability (the system must be a user friendly and easy to learn and use for the unexperienced users). That’s why WBAN security is often considered a hard task to achieve in current day technology [16, 17].
Finally, in this paper we will present an idea of making a better security solution for the WBAN by utilizing the computational powers that the smartphones have over the simple sensor nodes
This paper is organized as follows, we are going to present an overview of the WBAN architected and the security mechanisms and requirements for that system. In part two of this paper we will give the overview of the WBAN architecture, part three will be about the security requirements and part four will be about the security mechanisms. While, in part four we are going to give a methodology idea to obtain better security solution in the WBAN applications.
II. WBAN ARCHITECTURE
As, WBAN consists from a number of several types of sensors that are either attached or implanted in the human body, such as electro-myogram (EMG) and electro-cardio sensor (EKG), blood pressure sensor, and blood sugar level sensors etc. in order to provide a real-time monitoring of the patient health status [7].We can define Sensors as an electronic chips that are used to sense physiological data from the body of the patient. Also, sensors consists from five part as follows: firstly, a microcontroller that is responsible of data processing, compression, control over sensor nodes, and transmitting data as a network packets thought out the servers. Secondly, the memory part which is responsible for storing data temporary before transmitting it, thirdly, is the radio transceiver that is responsible of transmitting data between the nodes wirelessly. Fourthly, is the power supply that is usually a battery, and fifthly, there is an analog to digital convertor (ADC) that is responsible of converting data from its analog from into the digital form [2, 3].
ISSN(E): 2277-128X, ISSN(P): 2277-6451, pp. 30-34
is the beyond-WBAN which can be reached by the second layer the inter-WBAN via a getaway device (i.e. personal digital assistant PDA, mobile phone) this layer represents the data base of the health care system provider that includes the privet patient medical history information and through this layer and emergency notification could happen whenever it may occur in order to send some medical assistant to the patient at once. [8]. in figure 2. Below we show the architecture of the WBAN and its three tiers.
Fig2. WBAN architecture
III. WBAN SECURITY REQUIREMENTS
By way of, WBAN security and privacy represents a problem that is concerned an open problem and still needs some development work, in order to overcome the needed security system requirements. As, it have some specific characteristics such as the low computational power of the sensor nodes, and the fact that the data is being transmitted through the network also, the way to store and retrieve data in the medical database of the healthcare provider [13]. Additionally, the validation in the system security may risk the patient’s life directly and in some cases it might causes death. For that reason, the security of the WBAN system is an essential and an important feature to have in order to prevent any suspicious manipulation of the patient’s data at any one of the three tires [14, 19, 20]. The security requirements have many aspects to be aware of with the WBAN applications that we are going to point out below such as:
A. data confidentiality: since the WBAN depend on a wireless communication channels an attacker would be
able to monitor that information through eavesdropping or overhearing. However, using encryption techniques can help preventing these types of attacks [13, 19].
B. data integrity: it is the case where an attacker may change the data being transmitted through the communication channel. This may causes a wrong read of data, data integrity can be achieved via using authentication protocols [16, 17].
C. data authentication: it means the data must come from a legit source, and in our case sensor node. One of
the used method to achieve data authentication is using the message authentication code (MAC) [17, 18, 20].
D .data availability: it means the data must be available at all time and it is very important in WBAN. Since, data must have a live stream for monitoring (no denial-of-service) it is very important to provide a method to overcome this problem [14, 18].
There are many other types of system security requirements such as data freshness, encryption key management, system dependability, secure localization, accountability and flexibility that are a major problems in the WBAN system security [15, 17]. One must considered all the following aspects to a chive the required security for the system.
IV. WBAN SECURITY MECHANISMS
As we have explained earlier in the security requirements section above, we are going to discuss in this section the existing security mechanisms used to uphold data and network security, in order to reach a secure communication with WBAN applications this mechanisms are most commonly used, as many security methods can be used alone or beside each other in a hybrid setting, thus reaching the intendent goal of data being protected. We are going to point out some of them below they involve:
A. cryptography:
ISSN(E): 2277-128X, ISSN(P): 2277-6451, pp. 30-34
encryption key. The data transmitted as an encrypted form to prevent it from being monitored, changed, or acknowledged by any unauthorized personal. However, the sensor nodes are computationally weak and lack processing power, and only suitable cryptography mechanisms must be used in order to work in the WBAN environment [14, 17, 18].
B. security protocols:
Many security protocols are used with the WBAN such as the IEEE 802.15.4 and the IEEE 802.15.6 they represent a communication protocols that are used to serve in making a secured communication within a low power and short range wireless network that is connected to the patient’s body. Also, the support range vary from (75.9 Kbps) and up to (15.6 Mbps). These protocols have 8 security suits that are used according to the power of the sensor and the system requirements [9, 10].
C. Biometrics:
This types of mechanisms takes the advantage of the human body, and the connected sensors throughout the WBAN. Where, it is possible for the system to achieve security based on some biometrics such as fingerprints, iris scanner, and face recognition. The WBAN takes these values and utilize them to form the security aspect by making them encryption keys or use them as an access mechanisms (digital signature) for authenticating system users [11].
D. Secure Routing:
In some rare cases that are emergency situations the WBAN sensors may send their data readings to a substitute devices that are outside their radio vary. Routing mechanism could be used for such situations. The routing technique is done by following the routing protocols however, the routing protocols lakes a strong security mechanism that are able to protect them properly that may encounter in some case a denial-of-service attack [17].
V. CONCLUSIONS
The WBAN will serve a great role in the future by providing a convenient health care environment for the users at their normal everyday life. However the WBAN is still and emerging system that lies in its development stage that needs to be even further advanced. The security of this system represents an aspect of high importance as it can effects the human life’s directly. Thus, providing a strong secure system is still a challenge to be achieved in the WBAN du to the fact that the sensor node that are used with the patient body lacks the computational power required to protect the transmitted data. In the future a modified technique is needed in order to increase the reliability, availability and security for this system.
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