Lightweight Key Management for Group Communication in Body Area Networks through Physical Unclonable Functions

Medical sensors are usually attached to or implanted inside patient body. Since medical diagnosis and treatment are a complicated procedure, multiple sensors in Body Area Networks (BAN) often need to form a group to share the measurements during the decision making procedures. To protect the confidentiality and integrity of exchanged data, group keys need to be established and distributed. In this paper, we propose to design a lightweight mechanism for key generation and distribution for BAN sensor groups with physical unclonable functions (PUF). Using control unit as a middle point, the body sensors can determine the group name and generate the group secret. We describe the key refreshment procedures during group member changes. The analysis and simulation show that using established groups to support subsequent key distribution can greatly reduce the communication overhead.