Flexible and Efficient Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for BANs Based on Physiological Features

In Body Area Networks (BANs), bio-sensors can collect personal health information and cooperate with each other to provide intelligent health care services for medical users. Since personal health information is highly privacy-sensitive, the flourish of BANs still faces critical security challenges, especially secure communication between bio-sensors. In this paper, we propose a flexible and efficient authenticated key agreement scheme (PBAKA) to provide secure communication for BANs. Specifically, we employ a control unit (e.g., smart phone) to launch authentication based on physiological features collected from BANs, and integrate bilinear pairings to negotiate session keys for bio-sensors. Since physiological features can be collected from various kinds of bio-sensors in real time, PBAKA is flexible for adding new bio-sensors without pre-distributed keys. Meanwhile, PBAKA is computationally efficient by offloading authentication burden from resource-limited bio-sensors to the control unit. Security analysis demonstrates that PBAKA is provably secure under the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. Extensive experimental results validate efficient communication, computation and energy consumption of our scheme when compared with several existing solutions.