title: Secure publish-subscribe protocols for heterogeneous medical wireless body area networks.
abstract: Security and privacy issues in medical wireless body area networks (WBANs) constitute a major unsolved concern because of the challenges posed by the scarcity of resources in WBAN devices and the usability restrictions imposed by the healthcare domain. In this paper, we describe a WBAN architecture based on the well-known publish-subscribe paradigm. We present two protocols for publishing data and sending commands to a sensor that guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control. Both protocols are based on a recently proposed ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme that is lightweight enough to be embedded into wearable sensors. We show how sensors can implement lattice-based access control (LBAC) policies using this scheme, which are highly appropriate for the eHealth domain. We report experimental results with a prototype implementation demonstrating the suitability of our proposed solution.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganes, Madrid, Spain. ppicazo@inf.uc3m.es.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Picazo-Sanchez
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganes, Madrid, Spain. jestevez@inf.uc3m.es.
authors.forename: Juan E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Tapiador
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganes, Madrid, Spain. pperis@inf.uc3m.es.
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Peris-Lopez
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganes, Madrid, Spain. guillermo.suarez.tangil@uc3m.es.
authors.forename: Guillermo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Suarez-Tangil
mesh_terms: D016494:Computer Security / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003219:Confidentiality; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation; D014159:Transducers; D059015:Wireless Technology / Q000295:instrumentation*