Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Computers and Information - Department of Information Technology

Wireless body area networks (WBANs), groups of sensors deployed inside a human body, are envisioned to improve the healthcare domain by continuously monitoring and reporting patient's health to the health care systems. The components of WBANs are sensor nodes, sink (cellular phone or PDA), and backend server. The sensor nodes col-lect and measure a patient's body information to transmit it's to the cellular phone or PDA, which works as a sink and forwards the information to the backend server. How-ever, the nature of openly deployed sensor nodes, coupled with the lack of security, make it easy for intruders to attack WBANs. Patient's privacy is very important in WBANs, so it is a must to establish a strong security mechanism in order to face the WBAN attacks. Therefore, we propose a new scheme, PMAS, to achieve mutual authentication between a cell phone (personal device representing the sink) and WBAN's sensor nodes. In addi-tion, based on a modi ed idea of Di e-Hellman key exchange scheme, we establish a shared secret key between that sink and every sensor node in the network. The security analysis shows that PMAS thwart di erent attacks, including the replay, fake sink, fake sensor, and Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. Furthermore, comparing to previous authentication schemes, the computation and communication overheads added by our scheme are much smaller than those in previous schemes. Also, PMAS achieves anonymity, secret common key, con dentiality, and integrity to the sensor nodes. Thwarting both internal and ex-ternal attacks, PMAS can also be used inside a critical area such as healthcare systems. Furthermore, the performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme consumes 37% less computation, and 22% less communication than previous mutual authentication schemes

Issued also as CD