Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A typical BSN is presented in Figure 1. The
body sensor nodes extract a predefined set of
physiological body signals and wirelessly transmit
the measured values in a hop-by-hop fashion to a
BSN controller attached to the human body. The
BSN controller relays the collected signal values
to a nearby Internet base station or router which
in turn delivers the BSN physiological data to a
backend enterprise server for analysis and storage.
Employing BSNs in a health care environment
will certainly enhance the quality of the health
care service provided by supporting the ubiquitous
and pervasive monitoring of the patient. With
BSNs deployed on the patient's body, medical
personnel can examine and assess the patient
medical conditions in real time, anywhere, and at
anytime without requiring the patient to be
bounded to a specific location or physically con-
nected to monitoring equipment.
Despite all the technical and technological
advances in this field, considerable concerns are
raised about the security and privacy of the BSN
operation and the data it conveys from the hu-
man body. This concern is highly elevated with
systems that transmit life-vital monitoring data to
specialized hospital workstations and servers over
wireless network links and the Internet. Consider
the life-critical risk resulting from any intentional
malicious modification to the monitoring data
travelling over the wireless links or the Internet.
This is not to mention the patient's privacy viola-
tion that may result from any form of data captur-
ing or sniffing on the wireless communication
links or from the interaction with misbehaving
and untrustworthy medical staff. In fact, today
many industrial regulations and policies are being
implemented and enforced to guarantee the privacy
of medical electronic information and to prevent
any form of identity theft. Of these regulations we
can mention the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) (Annas, 2003) for
securing medical records and patient information
against theft, disclosure, or modification.
The main security risks that may be encoun-
tered in a BSN environment are:
1. Denial of service (DoS) attacks on the
availability of the network monitoring and
processing capabilities. Attacks on avail-
ability can start from basic jamming attacks
on the physical wireless channels to more
efficient and specialized DoS attacks at the
MAC and routing layers.
2. Attacks on the confidentiality of the wireless-
ly-transmitted patient data by eavesdropping
on the communication links.
3. Attacks on the integrity of data by mali-
ciously modifying, deleting, and replaying
network packets leading to erroneous and
incorrect diagnosis and treatment.
4. Privacy violation attacks on the patient data
by untrustworthy and misbehaving medical
personnel.
5. Sensor node compromise if an attacker were
able to capture a sensor node and maliciously
modify its program logic or extract its secret
cryptographic keying material. Although a
first thought renders this attack less prob-
able due to the tight integration of the sensor
network with the patient's body, the remote
programmability features supported by mod-
ern sensor operating systems makes the job
of the attacker easier on this front.
6. Attacks on the routing protocols used to
exchange messages among BSN nodes.
It should be noted that many of the above-
mentioned security risks can be currently tackled
using the field of computer security and cryptog-
raphy. However, the limited memory resources,
battery power, and processing capabilities of the
body sensor nodes make the implementation of
cryptographic constructs very complex and chal-
lenging. This is due to the fact that such crypto-
graphic mechanisms require resource-intensive
mathematical algorithms which heavily drain the
battery power of the sensing device.
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