CCSS: Collaborative Research: Developing A Physical-Channel Based Lightweight Authentication System for Wireless Body Area Networks

对患者的非侵入性和动态健康监测？无线身体区域网络(WBAN)上的生命体征为医疗保健系统中不断上升的成本提供了一种经济的解决方案。然而，由于资源受限的医疗传感器节点的运行和通信缺乏安全性，由WBAN提供的健康和医疗信息可能不可信。为了解决这个问题，必须提供适用于能力和资源受限的身体传感器设备的轻量级安全解决方案来认证数据传输。本研究项目的目标是开发一个适用于资源受限的广域网络的轻量级认证系统。拟议项目的结果将为确保在广域网上实时提供准确和安全的医疗信息提供支持。这项拟议的研究还将推进用于医疗保健应用的WBAN和值得信赖的生物医学计算领域。所提出的理论、模型和仿真代码可供工程师和研究人员用于设计和评估WBAN应用的安全机制。此外，与拟议研究紧密结合的一个重要教育目标是招募和培养下一代WBAN工程师。这将通过WBAN系统工程、安全和移动健康(MHealth)这些快速变化的技术领域的课程开发、学生指导和社区推广来实现。拟议的研究旨在实现WBAN的物理层安全方法，并开发创新的密钥协商和消息认证机制。与现有的方法(如基于生物特征的方法)不同，该认证系统不需要额外的硬件、纠错处理和比特同步，因此适合于资源受限和容量受限的WBANs中的医疗传感器节点。提出的研究任务包括(1)理论研究；(2)密钥协商方案的设计；(3)消息认证系统的开发；(4)系统的实现和验证。理论研究主要集中在渠道互惠、渠道依赖与密钥生成之间的关系。基于理论研究的结果，将开发实用的密钥协商方案，该方案在通信伙伴之间使用一组动态的无线信道特征。然后，该项目将设计一个适用于无线信道的轻量级认证系统，以确保医疗数据在WBANs中的传输安全。最后，本项目将在一个实际的资源受限的广域网络系统中实现所提出的物理层安全方法，并通过实验研究实际系统的性能极限。该项目的研究成果可以为基于物理通道的WBAN应用的安全系统设计和部署提供指导。

Non-intrusive and ambulatory health monitoring of patients? vital signs over Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) provides an economical solution to rising costs in the healthcare system. However, due to the lack of security in the operation and communication of resource-constrained medical sensor nodes, the health and medical information provided by the WBANs may not be trusted. To address this issue, lightweight security solutions that are suitable for capability and resource limited body sensor devices must be provided to authenticate the data transmission. The goal of this research project is to develop a lightweight authentication system for resource-constrained WBANs. Findings from the proposed project will provide support for ensuring real-time delivery of accurate and secure medical information in WBANs. The proposed research will also advance the fields of WBANs and trustworthy biomedical computing for healthcare applications. The proposed theories, models, and simulation code can be used by engineers and researchers to design and evaluate security mechanisms for WBAN applications. In addition, an important education objective tightly coupled with the proposed research is to recruit and educate future generation of WBAN engineers. This will be accomplished through curriculum development, student mentoring, and community outreach in these fast changing technical fields of WBAN system engineering, security and mobile health (mHealth).The proposed research aims at realizing physical layer security approaches for WBANs and developing innovative key agreement and message authentication mechanisms. Unlike existing approaches (e.g., biometric-based approaches), the proposed authentication system does not require additional hardware, error reconciliation process and bit synchronization, and thus is suitable for resource-constrained and capacity-limited medical sensor nodes in WBANs. The proposed research tasks include (1) theoretical studies; (2) design of key agreement schemes; (3) development of message authentication system; and (4) system implementation and validation. The theoretical studies focus on the connections between the channel reciprocity, channel dependency and key generation. Based on the results of theoretical studies, practical key agreement schemes that use a set of dynamic wireless channel features among the communication partners will be developed. The project will then design a lightweight authentication system that is adaptive to wireless channels for securing medical data transmission in WBANs. Finally, the project will implement the proposed physical layer security approach in a real resource-constrained WBANs system and investigate the practical system performance limit through experiments. The findings from the project can provide guidelines for physical-channel based security system design and deployment of WBAN applications.