Securing U-Healthcare Sensor Networks using Public Key Based Scheme

Abstract: Recent emergence of electronic culture uplifts healthcare facilities to a new era with the aid of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology. Due to the sensitiveness of medical data, austere privacy and security are inevitable for all parts of healthcare systems. However, the constantly evolving nature and constrained resources of sensors in WSN inflict unavailability of a lucid line of defense to ensure perfect security. In order to provide holistic security, protections must be incorporated in every component of healthcare sensor networks. This paper proposes an efficient security scheme for healthcare applications of WSN which uses the notion of public key cryptosystem. Our entire security scheme comprises basically of two parts; a key handshaking scheme based on simple linear operations and the derivation of decryption key by a receiver node for a particular sender in the network. Our architecture allows both base station to node or node to base station secure communications, and node-to-node secure communications. We consider both the issues of stringent security and network performance to propose our security scheme.