SEKES (Secure and Efficient Key Exchange Scheme for wireless Body Area Network)

The development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) for wireless sensing and monitoring of a person's vital functions, is an enabler in providing better personal health care whilst enhancing the quality of life. A critical factor in the acceptance of WBANs is providing appropriate security and privacy protection of the wireless communication. It is a challenge to implement traditional security infrastructures in these types of lightweight networks, since they are by design limited in both computational and communication resources. In this paper we propose and analyze an approach which exploits physiological signal to address security issues in WBANs, a secure and efficient key exchange scheme for WBANs (SEKES). SEKES manages the generation and distribution of symmetric cryptographic keys to constituent sensors in a WBAN and protects the privacy.