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Hide-n-Sense: Preserving Privacy Efficiently in Wireless mHealth

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Abstract

As healthcare in many countries faces an aging population and rising costs, mobile sensing technologies promise a new opportunity. Using mobile health (mHealth) sensing, which uses medical sensors to collect data about the patients, and mobile phones to act as a gateway between sensors and electronic health record systems, caregivers can continuously monitor the patients and deliver better care. Furthermore, individuals can become better engaged in monitoring and managing their own health. Although some work on mHealth sensing has addressed security, achieving strong privacy for low-power sensors remains a challenge. We make three contributions. First, we propose an mHealth sensing protocol that provides strong security and privacy properties at the link layer, with low energy overhead, suitable for low-power sensors. The protocol uses three novel techniques: adaptive security, to dynamically modify transmission overhead; MAC striping, to make forgery difficult even for small-sized Message Authentication Codes; and asymmetric resource requirements, in recognition of the limited resources in tiny mHealth sensors. Second, we demonstrate its feasibility by implementing a prototype on a Chronos wrist device, and evaluating it experimentally. Third, we provide a security, privacy, and energy analysis of our system.

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Notes

  1. To intercept a message, the adversary captures the message header when it is being transmitted, and then disrupts some bits in the payload or the MAC so that the receiver discards the message because it will fail the MAC verification process.

  2. A string is said indistinguishable from random bits if any computationally bounded adversary cannot guess correctly whether the string is truly random or not with a non-negligibly higher probability than the probability that she guesses incorrectly. The formal treatment of this security property can be found in [14].

  3. For the adversary to inject sensor data chosen by itself, the adversary needs to compute the corresponding ciphertext, which is difficult because it requires knowledge of the encryption key and nonce. As a forgery attack, however, it suffices to make the MN accept the ciphertext chosen by the adversary, whatever the decrypted data might be.

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Acknowledgments

This research results from a research program at the Institute for Security, Technology, and Society at Dartmouth College, supported by the National Science Foundation under award number 0910842, and by the Department of Health and Human Services (SHARP program) under award number 90TR0003-01. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the sponsors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA

    Shrirang Mare, Cory Cornelius & David Kotz

  2. School of Computing, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Jacob Sorber

  3. Department of Computer Engineering, Myongji University, Yongin, Gyonggido, South Korea

    Minho Shin

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  1. Shrirang Mare
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  2. Jacob Sorber
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  3. Minho Shin
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  4. Cory Cornelius
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  5. David Kotz
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Correspondence to Minho Shin.

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Mare, S., Sorber, J., Shin, M. et al. Hide-n-Sense: Preserving Privacy Efficiently in Wireless mHealth. Mobile Netw Appl 19, 331–344 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-013-0447-x

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