Abstract:
Information security in Wireless Body Area
Networks (WBAN) is required to maintain confidentiality,
integrity and privacy of a person’s health data. Biosignal
like Electrocardiogram (ECG) has patient’s
sensitive information and needs secure transmission. The
WBAN sensors have limited resources and hence the
traditional cryptographic algorithms are not suitable.
Compared to asymmetric (public-key) cryptography,
symmetric (private-key) cryptography provides good
efficiency in terms of energy because of its less
computational requirement. In private-key cryptography,
the lightweight block ciphers which are small in block
size and key size are suitable for WBAN to meet the
energy efficiency and security concerns. This paper
investigates the energy efficiency performance of the
lightweight block ciphers PRESENT (80,128) and AES
while transmitting feature extracted ECG data using
TelosB mote running Contiki OS. The implementation
and analysis result show that the PRESENT cipher
achieves good energy efficiency and is well suitable for
low profile sensor nodes in WBAN.
