EAGER: USBRCCR: HealthSense: Assessing and Protecting Privacy in Wireless Wearable Sensor-Generated Medical Data

医疗和穿戴式传感器将在未来十年加强人类健康监测和重大疾病的诊断。随着此类设备的普及，将会出现针对隐私入侵的各种新型攻击。在所有此类情况下，确保用户的生理数据仅由授权实体访问并秘密传输给远程医疗专家至关重要。该项目将首先调查可穿戴设备产生的攻击向量，例如通过分析无线传输的传感器数据流量来推断私人健康信息。为了应对此类威胁，该项目将涉及设计一种安全的密钥建立方法以及身体传感器和外部设备之间的通信，其中信号通过人体组织发送以消除窃听。 该项目的目标将通过巴西无线安全专家的合作来实现，这也将导致联合出版物、学生和教师交流以及联合课程开发。作为该项目研究的一部分，PI 将研究如何使用跨层和联合硬件-软件指纹识别技术来跟踪时间和空间上的给定用户，然后以高概率识别哪些类型的医疗传感应用程序处于活动状态。这将是首次对健康特定的身体传感器流量进行流量分析，并为可穿戴传感器构建一套全面的参考签名，迄今为止，为互联网应用开发的经典技术尚未解决这一问题。拟议的任务还将展示首创的侧通道技术，使用非辐射人体通道，用于人体佩戴的传感器和信息中继设备（例如移动电话）之间的安全密钥建立、通信和多因素身份验证。这些方法的基础是一种称为电流耦合的技术，其中用数据信号调制微弱电流，然后通过人体组织的高导电通路传输。该共享秘密既可以是加密密钥，也可以是消除射频嗅探的随机流量整形种子，从而减轻上述类型的隐私入侵。

Medical and body-worn sensors will enhance human health monitoring and diagnosis of critical ailments in the next decade. As the popularity of such devices increases, there will be an emergence of new and varied types of attacks targeting privacy intrusions. In all such cases, ensuring that user's physiological data is only accessed by authorized entities and confidentially transmitted to the remote medical experts is of critical importance. The project will first investigate the attack vectors resulting from wearable devices such as inference of private health information by analyzing the sensor data traffic transmitted over-the-air. To address such threats, the project will involve the design of a secure method of key establishment and communications between a body sensor and an external device, where signals are sent through the human tissue to eliminate eavesdropping. The project goals will be accomplished with collaboration from wireless security experts in Brazil, which will also lead to joint publications, student and faculty exchanges, and joint coursework development.As part of the research undertaken in this project, the PIs will investigate how cross-layer and joint hardware-software fingerprinting techniques can be used to track a given user over time and space, and then identify with high probability, which types of medical sensing applications are active. This will be the first traffic analysis of health-specific body sensor traffic and building a comprehensive set of reference signatures for wearable sensors, which has so far not been addressed by classical techniques developed for Internet applications. The proposed tasks will also demonstrate a first-of-its-kind side-channel technique, using a non-radiating body channel, for secure key establishment, communications, and multi-factor authentication between body-worn sensors and the information-relaying device, such as a mobile phone. Underlying these methods is a technique called galvanic coupling, where weak electrical currents are modulated with the data signals, and then transmitted via highly conductive pathways of the human tissue. This shared secret can be both an encryption key as well as a randomized traffic shaping seed that eliminates RF sniffing, thereby mitigating the above types of privacy intrusions.