title: Secure Authentication for Remote Patient Monitoring with Wireless Medical Sensor Networks.
abstract: There is broad consensus that remote health monitoring will benefit all stakeholders in the healthcare system and that it has the potential to save billions of dollars. Among the major concerns that are preventing the patients from widely adopting this technology are data privacy and security. Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (MSNs) are the building blocks for remote health monitoring systems. This paper helps to identify the most challenging security issues in the existing authentication protocols for remote patient monitoring and presents a lightweight public-key-based authentication protocol for MSNs. In MSNs, the nodes are classified into sensors that report measurements about the human body and actuators that receive commands from the medical staff and perform actions. Authenticating these commands is a critical security issue, as any alteration may lead to serious consequences. The proposed protocol is based on the Rabin authentication algorithm, which is modified in this paper to improve its signature signing process, making it suitable for delay-sensitive MSN applications. To prove the efficiency of the Rabin algorithm, we implemented the algorithm with different hardware settings using Tmote Sky motes and also programmed the algorithm on an FPGA to evaluate its design and performance. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is implemented and tested using the MIRACL (Multiprecision Integer and Rational Arithmetic C/C++) library. The results show that secure, direct, instant and authenticated commands can be delivered from the medical staff to the MSN nodes.
authors.affiliation: School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, NY 11568, USA. thayajne@nyit.edu.
authors.forename: Thaier
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hayajneh
authors.affiliation: Computer Engineering Department, Hashemite University, Zarqa 13133, Jordan. Bassam@hu.edu.jo.
authors.forename: Bassam J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Mohd
authors.affiliation: College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, AlMuzahmiah 11451, Saudi Arabia. dr.m.imran@ieee.org.
authors.forename: Muhammad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Imran
authors.affiliation: Computer Science Department, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA. ghada@cs.columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Ghada
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Almashaqbeh
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Lulea University of Technology, Lulea 97187, Sweden. th.vasilakos@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Athanasios V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Vasilakos
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000295:instrumentation*; D016494:Computer Security; D004562:Electrocardiography; D006801:Humans; D008503:Medical Staff; D008991:Monitoring, Physiologic / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D018907:Privacy; D058998:Remote Sensing Technology / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D059015:Wireless Technology
keywords: FPGA implementation; MSN; Rabin algorithm; authentication; remote patient monitoring; security issues