Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): Security and Authentication Methods

Abstract

The demand for WBAN has increased for last few years because it is useful network to monitor and
improve various health conditions of human being. Information’s exchanges among different entities
are very sensitive, so it is vital to keep this information’s secure from unauthorized access in order to
avoid unpleasant incidents. Security and privacy are the most critical issues. Security is the important
issue for any network and especially in WBANs its proper management is very crucial otherwise
biomedical data collected by sensor nodes should be mixed with other user’s data. Also, patients do
not want their personal data to be misused and WBAN should provide the privacy to prevent
eavesdropping. Mutual authentication is also a key challenge in WBAN, and patients’ data originality
and integrity are important for their treatment diagnosis etc. Development of the new mutual
authentication schemes in healthcare applications without considering security makes patient privacy
vulnerable. In this paper, we discuss communication technologies, possible attacks and recently most
used popular authentication methods in WBANs.