Medical Sciences—medical information systems

A medical sensor network can wirelessly monitor vital signs of humans, making it useful for long-term health care with-out sacrificing patient comfort and mobility. For such a net-work to be viable, its design must protect data privacy and authenticity given that medical data are highly sensitive. We identify the unique security challenges facing such a sen-sor network and propose a set of resource-efficient mecha-nisms to address these challenges. Our solution includes (1) a novel two-tier scheme for verifying the authenticity of pa-tient data; (2) an ECC-based secure key exchange protocol to set up shared keys between sensor nodes and base sta-tions; and (3) symmetric encryption/decryption for protect-ing data confidentiality and integrity. We have implemented the proposed mechanisms on a wireless mote platform and our results confirm their feasibility