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Secure Device Pairing Protocol Based on Wireless Channel Characteristics for Body Area Networks

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Physical Layer Security

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Abstract

The increasing interest in the usage of wireless body area networks (WBAN) in healthcare and other critical applications underscores the importance of secure communications among the body sensor devices. One of the major challenges in WBAN is the association of an unknown device with an existing network without prior knowledge of a secret key. The state-of-the-art authentication mechanisms for WBAN typically rely on the received signal strength (RSS). However, RSS-based methods employing a single antenna are susceptible to environmental factors and an adversary can easily mount an attack by varying the transmission power. We present SeAK, the first secure light-weight device pairing protocol for WBAN based on the RSS obtained by dual-antenna transceivers utilizing spatial diversity. With spatially separated antennas, the RSS values from a nearby device are large and distinct, as opposed to those from a far-away device. SeAK authenticates a legitimate device and generates shared secret key simultaneously. We implement our SeAK prototype on the Opal sensor platform having RF231 radio that is compatible for communication in 2.4 GHz. Our protocol is shown to achieve a 100% success-acceptance rate, securely authenticate a nearby device, and generate a 128-bit secret key in 640 ms, as opposed to 15.9 s in other recent RSS-based schemes (e.g. ASK-BAN).

The work has been carried out when Dr. Girish Revadigar and Dr. Lavy Libman were at UNSW Sydney, Australia.

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Acknowledgment

This work is partially supported by Australian Research Council Discovery grant DP150100564.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR, Singapore, Singapore

    Chitra Javali

  2. Huawei International Pte. Ltd., Singapore, Singapore

    Girish Revadigar

  3. Google, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Lavy Libman

  4. Data61, CSIRO, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Ming Ding

  5. The School of Electrical & Information Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Zihuai Lin

  6. School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Sanjay Jha

Authors
  1. Chitra Javali
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  2. Girish Revadigar
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  3. Lavy Libman
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  4. Ming Ding
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  5. Zihuai Lin
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  6. Sanjay Jha
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Correspondence to Chitra Javali .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia

    Khoa N. Le

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Javali, C., Revadigar, G., Libman, L., Ding, M., Lin, Z., Jha, S. (2021). Secure Device Pairing Protocol Based on Wireless Channel Characteristics for Body Area Networks. In: Le, K.N. (eds) Physical Layer Security. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55366-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55366-1_7

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