International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET) e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 05 Issue: 05 | May-2018 www.irjet.net p-ISSN: 2395-0072
© 2018, IRJET | Impact Factor value: 6.171 | ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal | Page 3653
Data Security and Privacy in Wireless Sensor Devices
Meekhal Solomon
1
, Eldo P Elias
2
1
Student, Mar Athanasius College of Engineering Kothamangalam, India
2
Second Assistant Professor, Dept. of CSE, Mar Athanasius College of Engineering Kothamangalam, India
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Abstract - The wireless medical sensor network has
emerged as a new technology for e-healthcare that allows the
data of a patient's vital body parameters to be collected by
small wearable and communicated using short-range wireless
communication techniques. It has shown great potential in
improving healthcare quality, and thus has found a wide range
of applications which includes ubiquitous health monitoring
and computer assisted rehabilitation to emergency medical
response systems. But, deploying new technologies in
healthcare applications without considering security makes
patient privacy vulnerable. Moreover, the physiological data
of an individual are highly sensitive. Therefore, security is a
paramount requirement of healthcare applications. A
practical approach for secure data storage, and fine-grained
distributed data access control for sensitive and confidential
patient medical data is proposed in this work. Here, for
security, the sensor data is splitted and stored in three
different servers. RSA algorithm is used for digital signatures
for different users. Most importantly, we use homomorphic
encryption scheme to access and to perform statistical analysis
on the data collected. Also we use attribute based encryption
for fine grained access control for personal as well as medical
data of the patient.
Key Words: WSN, DSS, Paillier Cryptosystem, ABE
1. INTRODUCTION
Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) is a key
enabling technology in e-healthcare that allows the data of a
patient’s vital body parameters to be collected by wearable
biosensors. Recently, interest in wireless systems for
medical applications has been rapidly increasing. With a
number of advantages over wired alternatives, including:
ease of use, reduced risk of infection, reduced risk of failure,
reduce patient discomfort, enhance mobility and low cost of
care delivery, wireless applications bring forth exciting
possibilities for new applications in medical market.
Wireless medical sensor networks certainly improve
patient’s quality-of-care without disturbing their comfort.
However, there exist many potential security threats to the
patient sensitive physiological data transmitted over the
public channels and stored in the back-end systems. The
common threats are eavesdropping, spoofing, altering and
replaying attacks. The aim of the proposed work is to
develop a new method to prevent the inside attack by using
multiple data servers to store patient data, analyze the
medical data from body worn sensors, provide authorized
access to each part of the patient data and perform statistical
analysis on the data without compromising the patient’s
privacy. The data collection protocol is based on a random
number generator which splits the patient data into three
and sent it to the three servers. To access the patient data
without revealing it to any data server, a new data access
protocol is proposed on the basis of the Paillier
cryptosystem and attribute based encryption. Privacy
preserving statistical analysis are also done using these
protocols.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the
related works. Section III describes working of the proposed
system and in Section IV the conclusions of this research is
presented.
2. RELATED WORKS
Healthcare applications are considered as promising elds
for wireless sensor networks. In recent years, several
WMSN projects have been proposed and a a lot of work has
been done to protect the wireless medical sensor networks
against various attacks. Some among them are listed here.
CodeBlue [2], [3] is a popular healthcare research project
based on WMSN developed at the Harvard Sensor Network
Lab. In the architecture, several medical sensors (e.g., pulse
oximeter, EMG, EKG, and SpO2 sensors) are placed on the
patient’s body. These medical sensors sense the patient body
and transmit it wirelessly to the end-user devices (PDAs,
laptops, and personal computers) for further analysis.
Furthermore, the Code Blue architecture facilitates RF-based
localization, which is accurate enough to locate a patient’s or
medical professional’s position.
In [11], a secure, lightweight public key - based security
scheme, Mutual Authentication and Access Control based on
Elliptic curve cryptography (MAACE) is described. MAACE is
a mutual authentication protocol where a healthcare
professional can authenticate to an accessed node (a PDA or
medical sensor) and vice versa. This is to ensure that medical
data is not exposed to an unauthorized person. On the other
hand, it ensures that medical data sent to healthcare
professionals did not originate from a malicious node. MAACE
is more scalable and requires less memory compared to
symmetric key-based schemes. Furthermore, it is much more
lightweight than other public key-based schemes.
Dagtas et al. [16] proposed a real time and secure
architecture for health monitoring in smart homes using
ZigBee technology. The proposed framework has the
following features: (a) the ability to detect signals wirelessly
within a body area sensor
network (BSN); (b) low-power and reliable data transmission
using ZigBee technology; (c) secure transmission of medical
data over BSN; (d) efficient channel allocation over wireless