MARS - Towards Mobile Assisted RSSI Secret Key Extraction Strategy in WBANs

The emergence of wireless body area networks (WBANs) has paved the way for real-time sensing of human biometrics in addition to remote control of smart medical devices, which in turn is revolutionising the smart healthcare industry. However, the limited power and computational capabilities of WBAN sensors make them vulnerable to a myriad of security attacks, thus securing them is paramount to their success and wider adoption. Received signal strength indicator (RSSI) secure key extraction (SKE) methods are used for securing WBAN sensors. However, such methods may suffer from stagnant RSSI values, significantly increasing the secret keys construction time. To remedy this, we propose a new method that involves one of the two sensors being mobile and thus can be picked up and moved around. This results in the stimulation of RSSI values which in turn improves the quality of the generated keys and thus shortening the execution times of the SKE process. The evaluation results highlighted the effectiveness of our method.