BDK: Secure and Efficient Biometric based Deterministic Key Agreement in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have been widely adopted to efficiently monitor patients' realtime health condition for medical treatment and emergency handling. Key agreement with the properties of plug-n-play and transparency for WBANs is indispensably required to establish the secure communication channels among body sensors. Existing works mainly focus on exploiting the technique of fuzzy vault to allow body sensors deployed on the same human body can securely establish a pairwise key at a high probability, where the authentic extracted biometric characteristics and the chaff points are indistinguishable from the adversaries' view except a brute attack. However, it simultaneously brings about a large body of additional overhead for dealing with the redundancy. In this paper, a secure and efficient biometric based deterministic key agreement for WBANs is proposed by exploiting the overlap between the biometric characteristics collected by body sensors. The pairwise keys for WBANs can be definitely negotiated by the interactions between body sensors embedded in the same human body. The security depends on the underlying one way trapdoor function rather than the coffer/vault size. Extensive simulations and comparisons illustrate the efficiency and practicability of our proposed construction BDK and the advantages over the state-of-the-art with stronger resilience, less storage, computational and communication overhead.