Energy-efficient key distribution using electrocardiograph biometric set for secure communications in wireless body healthcare networks

Wireless body sensor network (WBSN) has gained significant interests as an important infrastructure for real-time biomedical healthcare systems, while the security of the sensitive health information becomes one of the main challenges. Due to the constraints of limited power, traditional cryptographic key distribution schemes are not suitable for WBSN. This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient approach, BodyKey, which can distribute the keys using the electrocardiograph biometrics. BodyKey represents the biometric features as ordered set, and deals with the biometric variations using set reconciliation. In this way, only limited necessary information needs to be communicated for key agreement, and the total energy consumption for key distribution can thus be reduced. Experiments on the PhysioBank Database show that BodyKey can perform an energy consumption rate of 0.01 mJ/bit with an equal accuracy rate of 97.28%, allowing the system to be used as an energy-efficient key distribution scheme for secure communications in WBSN.