Trust-Based DoS Mitigation Technique for Medical Implants in Wireless Body Area Networks

Medical implants are an important part of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and play an important role to monitor, diagnose, and control various medical conditions. These tiny sensors are injected inside human body to measure and communicate various vital signs of a human body. Since the information transmitted by implants is very sensitive and critical in nature, both availability and confidentiality of such information are of prime importance. A possible security threat in medical implants that can breach the availability of the medical implants is a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In this work, we propose a solution to mitigate DoS attack in the Medical Implant Communication Service (MICS) network. We propose a three-level trust model for a MICS network based on its environment and couple a threshold of maximum allowed data rate to each environment. The simulation results show that DoS attacks can be seamlessly mitigated in many MICS settings.