Paper Info
Title
Information Theoretic Key Agreement Protocol based on ECG signals
Abstract
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are becoming increasingly popular as they allow individuals to continuously monitor their vitals and physiological parameters remotely from the hospital. With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the availability of portable pulse-oximeters and wearable heart rate detectors has boomed in the market. At the same time, in 2020 we assisted to an unprecedented increase of healthcare breaches, revealing the extreme vulnerability of the current generation of WBANs. Therefore, the development of new security protocols to ensure data protection, authentication, integrity and privacy within WBANs are highly needed. Here, we targeted a WBAN collecting ECG signals from different sensor nodes on the individual's body, we extracted the inter-pulse interval (i.e., R-R interval) sequence from each of them, and we developed a new information theoretic key agreement protocol that exploits the inherent randomness of ECG to ensure authentication between sensor pairs within the WBAN. After proper pre-processing, we provide an analytical solution that ensures robust authentication; we provide a unique information reconciliation matrix, which gives good performance for all ECG sensor pairs; and we can show that a relationship between information reconciliation and privacy amplification matrices can be found. Finally, we show the trade-off between the level of security, in terms of key generation rate, and the complexity of the error correction scheme implemented in the system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/GLOBECOM46510.2021.9685523
2021 IEEE GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE (GLOBECOM)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
Key agreement, information theory, biometrics, ECG, IPI, wireless body area networks
Conference
2334-0983
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anna V. Guglielmi1113.48
Alberto Muraro200.34
Giulia Cisotto311.04
Nicola Laurenti417016.73