4th International ICST Conference on Body Area Networks

Research Article

Key-sharing via channel randomness in narrowband body area networks: Is everyday movement sufficient?

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.BODYNETS2009.5941,
        author={Leif W. Hanlen and David Smith and Jian (Andrew) Zhang and Daniel Lewis},
        title={Key-sharing via channel randomness in narrowband body area networks: Is everyday movement sufficient?},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Body Area Networks},
        publisher={ICST},
        proceedings_a={BODYNETS},
        year={2010},
        month={5},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.4108/ICST.BODYNETS2009.5941}
    }
    
  • Leif W. Hanlen
    David Smith
    Jian (Andrew) Zhang
    Daniel Lewis
    Year: 2010
    Key-sharing via channel randomness in narrowband body area networks: Is everyday movement sufficient?
    BODYNETS
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/ICST.BODYNETS2009.5941
Leif W. Hanlen1,*, David Smith1, Jian (Andrew) Zhang1, Daniel Lewis1
  • 1: NICTA, Canberra, Australia
*Contact email: leif.hanlen@nicta.com.au

Abstract

We consider secure communication for Body-Area-Networks (BAN’s). We examine the near-body radio channel of BAN’s as a source of common randomness between two sensors. The movement of the subject and associated fading is used to hide a secure key from Eve. We examine recently approved radio channel models of the IEEE 802.15.6 Task Group, and show that the common randomness is too low rate for unconditional encoding. We find a key-generation rate around 2bits/second. We suggest the channel randomness may be better used in generating perpetually new keys for an AESstyle encryption – eg, a 128bits key every minute – via a randomness scavenging procedure.