CARA-BAN: Clone Attack Resistant Authentication Scheme in Body Area Networks Using Channel Characteristics

摘要

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a network of small sensor devices placed on the patients' bodies to remotely collect their health information and transmit it to medical professionals via open wireless channels. However, the collected data is vulnerable to unauthorized access due to the open nature of the wireless channels. Thus, a reliable authentication mechanism is essential in the study of WBAN. The limited resources of the devices in WBAN prevents the adoption of complex traditional cryptographic authentication schemes. As a result, authentication schemes based on channel characteristics are proposed, which are more preferable due to their simpler requirements. However, an attacker in the existing channel characteristics based approaches is always assumed to be an off-body device. Thus, the schemes are not secure against an on-body clone attacker, which is a clone device created from a legitimate on-body device and placed back on the body by a privileged insider. To address this limitation, we first propose CARA-BAN, a novel clone attack resistant authentication (CARA) scheme for body area network (BAN) based on channel characteristics and lightweight symmetric encryption. Then, we conduct security and performance analyses to demonstrate the resistance of the scheme to security attacks and its effectiveness regarding resources. Finally, we perform real-world experiments in indoor and outdoor places, involving 3 volunteers to validate the robustness of the scheme. The results show that CARA-BAN can effectively identify 90% of attack attempts from a clone on-body attacker device with negligible overhead.