Lightweight Secure ECG Transmission in Wireless Body Area Networks - PRESENT Cipher Based Implementation

With the increased application of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) in healthcare industry, the real-time monitoring of medical information from different sensor nodes has to be secure and energy efficient. Bio-signal like Electrocardiogram (ECG) from the sensors contains sensitive information of a patient and needs to be transmitted securely in order to maintain the confidentiality. The sensors employed in WBAN have limited resources and hence the traditional cryptographic mechanisms are not suitable. Compared to asymmetric cryptography, symmetric cryptography provides good energy efficiency due to its low computational cost. In symmetric key cryptography, block ciphers play an important role in the security of embedded systems. A Lightweight block cipher, with small block size and key size, is appropriate for WBAN as it is energy efficient and provides sufficient security. In this paper secure electrocardiogram (ECG) transmission is implemented using lightweight block cipher PRESENT (80) in a Telosb sensor mote running in ContikiOS and the performance is analyzed in terms of CPU power consumption.