Energy analysis of lightweight block ciphers for secure ECG transmission in WBAN nodes [articol]

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.