KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks

Yee Wei Law, Giorgi Moniava, Zheng Gong, Pieter Hartel, Marimuthu Palaniswami

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

    15 Citations (Scopus)
    181 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1309-1329
    Number of pages21
    JournalSecurity and communication networks
    Volume16
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Nov 2011

    Keywords

    • SCS-Cybersecurity
    • Health Care
    • Security
    • Body Area Networks
    • Body sensor networks
    • Key management

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