Distributed Data Security and Privacy in WBAN-Related e-Health Systems

Abstract

The wireless body area network (WBAN) has emerged as a new technology for ehealthcarethat allows the data of a patient’s vital body parameters and movementsto be collected by small wearable or implantable sensors and communicated usingshort-range wireless communication techniques. WBAN has shown great potential inimproving healthcare quality, and thus has found a wide range of applications.However, the security and privacy protection of the data collected from a WBAN,either while stored inside the WBAN or during their transmission outside of theWBAN, is a major unsolved concern. Challenges are mainly coming from stringentresource constraints of WBAN devices. The aim of this work is to achieve secure anddependable distributed data storage in the WBAN. At the first part of the paper, wewill survey the most recent research directions in the field.Significant recent papersare discussed and compared to each other to identify the advantages anddisadvantages of each technique. Then, our proposed strategy will be devoted basedon that survey. The proposal is mainly based on the techniques of erasure coding,secret sharing and an algebraic signature to simultaneously achieve dataconfidentiality, dependability, and dynamic integrity.