Securing communications between external users and wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (BANs) are expected to play a crucial role in patient-health monitoring in the near future. Establishing secure communications between BAN sensors and external users is key to addressing the prevalent security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose the primitive functions to implement a secret-sharing based Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP_ABE) scheme, which encrypts the data based on an access structure specified by the data source. We also design two protocols to securely retrieve the sensitive patient data from a BAN and instruct the sensors in a BAN. Our analysis indicates that the proposed scheme is feasible, can provide message authenticity, and can counter possible major attacks such as collusion attacks and battery-draining attacks.