Randomness of physiological signals in generation cryptographic key for secure communication between implantable medical devices inside the body and the outside world

摘要

A physiological signal must have a certain level of randomness inside it to be a good source of randomness for generating cryptographic key. Dependency to the history is one of the measures to examine the strength of a randomness source. In dependency to the history, the adversary has infinite access to the history of generated random bits from the source and wants to predict the next random number based on that. Although many physiological signals have been proposed in literature as good source of randomness, no dependency to history analysis has been carried out to examine this fact. In this paper, using a large dataset of physiological signals collected from PhysioNet, the dependency to history of Interpuls Interval (IPI), QRS Complex, and EEG signals (including Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma and Theta waves) were examined. The results showed that despite the general assumption that the physiological signals are random, all of them are weak sources of randomness with high dependency to their history. Among them, Alpha wave of EEG signal shows a much better randomness and is a good candidate for post-processing and randomness extraction algorithm.