Towards Secure and Practical MACs for Body Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) commonly requires lower level security for public information gathering, whilst body sensor network (BSN) must be secured with strong authenticity to protect personal health information. First in this paper, some practical problems with the Message Authentication Codes (MACs), which are suggested in the current security architectures for WSN, are reconsidered. The analysis exploits the fact that the recommended MACs for WSN, e.g., TinySec (CBC-MAC), MiniSec (OCB-MAC), and SenSec (XCBC-MAC), are not exactly suitable for BSN. Particularly a dedicated attack is elaborated on the XCBC-MAC. Considering the hardware limitations of BSN, we propose a tunable lightweight MAC based on the PRESENT block cipher, which is named TuLP. A 128-bit variant TuLP-128 is proposed for a higher resistance against internal collisions. Compared to the existing schemes, our lightweight MACs show better performance and higher energy-efficiency at lower memory usage. Key words. Mes...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INDOCRYPT
• Authors: Zheng Gong, Pieter H. Hartel, Svetla Nikova, Bo Zhu
• Keywords: Body Sensor Network, Cryptology, INDOCRYPT 2009, Message Authentication Code, Sensor Network