Security in pervasive health care using location-based key generation schemes

Remote health monitoring has tremendous potential to improve quality of health care services in modern and ubiquitous medical environments. It helps to cut the cost in modern healthcare by avoiding unnecessary hospital visits for frequent checkups. In this context, security and protection of sensitive medical data such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), data integrity and protection of patient's privacy to be monitored are important aspects in order to increase user's acceptance of these new technologies. Secure communication protects data from unauthorized users and usually requires pairwise keys. In all existing schemes these keys are generated and distributed to nodes wishing to communicate. The key generation phase is usually well-secured but the key distribution is not, as a result, they are vulnerable to security threats. In this work, we investigate the key distribution problem inside a Body Sensor Network (BSN) and present two secure communication schemes which, unlike others, do not store a key chain in the memory from a universal key space and eliminate key broadcast. We have made the key generation phase relatively more secured with the use of location information. Authentication of biosensor nodes is also an important issue and has been taken into consideration in our schemes. Simulation of our schemes illustrates that they outperform some existing schemes and comparatively incurs less transmission and storage cost.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science (UMKC)

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Missouri--Kansas City

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Acharya, Debargh, 1983-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kumar, Vijay, 1946-

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10355/11369

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mospace.umsystem.edu:10355/11369