Improvement of fuzzy vault scheme for securing key distribution in body sensor network

The security of Body Sensor Network (BSN) has become a vital concern, as the massive development of BSN applications in healthcare. A family of biometrics based security methods has been proposed in the last several years, where the bio-information derived from physiological signals is used as entity identifiers (EIs) for multiple security purposes, including node recognition and keying material protection. Among them, a method named as Physiological Signal based Key Agreement (PSKA) was proposed to use frequency-domain information of physiological signals together with Fuzzy Vault scheme to secure key distribution in BSN. In this study, the PSKA scheme was firstly analyzed and evaluated for its practical usage in terms of fuzzy performance, the result of which indicates that the scheme is not as good as claimed. An improved scheme with the deployment of Fuzzy Vault and error correcting coding was then proposed, followed by simulation analysis. The results indicate that the improved scheme is able to improve the performance of Fuzzy Vault and thus the success rate of authentication or key distribution between genuine nodes of a BSN.