Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
BIOMETRIC HUMAN
IDENTIFICATION WITH BSNS
on a collection of body-extracted vital signals to
securely derive cryptographic keys for protecting
the BSN data communication.
Since fully comprehending this analysis
requires some background in the anatomy and
electrical activity of the human heart, we will
try to bridge this gap by presenting some basic
information on this background material. This
will hopefully simplify the discussion and make
it closer to the reader. The interested reader may
refer to (Taccardi et al., 1997) for a more com-
prehensive discussion on the topic.
Automatic human identification or verification
using biometric techniques has had successful
implementations in authorization and access con-
trol security systems. The recognition is mainly
based on unique human characteristics or features
such as the retina and iris patterns, hand geometry,
facial structure, voice properties, and last but not
least the popular palm and finger prints. In spite of
the high identification accuracy provided by these
verification techniques, they suffer from some
security and accessibility risks and limitations.
The main security risk resides in the possibility of
criminals to forcefully capture the biometric organ
or characteristic such as stealing a digital copy of
a subject's voice recording in a voice recognition
system or more radically chopping the subject's
finger in fingerprint authentication system. As
far as accessibility is concerned, these biometric
techniques require the subject to authenticate to
specific identification devices, such as fingerprint
scanners or voice recognition computer systems.
This renders these solutions not suitable for dy-
namic human identification on mobile subjects.
With the advancements achieved in BSN
technology and applications, researchers started
analyzing the possibility of using the vital signals
extracted by body sensors for automatic human
identification. Due to the ability of BSNs to
wirelessly transmit the collected body signals
and the availability of security mechanisms to
protect the transmission process, BSN human
identification can play a role in resolving some
of the security and accessibility hurdles faced by
traditional verification systems. In this section
we describe an identification technique based on
the heart electrical activity recorded by an Elec-
trocardiogram. In the next section we continue
this analysis with a discussion on the different
biometric key establishment protocols proposed
in the BSN security context. These protocols rely
The Human Heart Anatomy
and Operation
The human heart is an electromechanical pump
whose main responsibility is to deliver oxygen-
ated blood to the body tissues and carry away
deoxygenated blood from body tissues towards
the lungs. Anatomically, the heart is longitudinally
divided into two halves with each half consisting
of two chambers. This structure resembles a two-
stage pump in each half, the first stage is called
the atrium which receives deoxygenated blood
from body tissues on the right half and oxygen-
ated blood from the lungs on the left half, and the
second stage is called the ventricle which receives
blood from the atria through special heart valves
and pumps it to the lungs on the right half and
to the rest of the body on the left half. The two
heart halves are separated by a wall known as the
septum. Symbolically, the heart is represented in
the block diagram shown in Figure 3.
The myocardium or the heart muscle is ca-
pable of undergoing strong contractions (mainly
at the ventricles) due to an electrical excitation
known as the action potential. The electrical
impulses are produced by a pacemaker area known
as the sinoatrial node (SA node) located in the
upper right side of the right atrium. The signals
generated by the SA node spreads rapidly through
the right and left atria down to the right and left
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