Hoon Jae Lee

Security Issues in Healthcare Applications Using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks: A Survey

Healthcare applications are considered as promising fields for wireless sensor networks, where patients can be monitored using wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs). Current WMSN healthcare research trends focus on patient reliable communication, patient mobility, and energy-efficient routing, as a few examples. However, deploying new technologies in healthcare applications without considering security makes patient privacy vulnerable. Moreover, the physiological data of an individual are highly sensitive. Therefore, security is a paramount requirement of healthcare applications, especially in the case of patient privacy, if the patient has an embarrassing disease. This paper discusses the security and privacy issues in healthcare application using WMSNs. We highlight some popular healthcare projects using wireless medical sensor networks, and discuss their security. Our aim is to instigate discussion on these critical issues since the success of healthcare application depends directly on patient security and privacy, for ethic as well as legal reasons. In addition, we discuss the issues with existing security mechanisms, and sketch out the important security requirements for such applications. In addition, the paper reviews existing schemes that have been recently proposed to provide security solutions in wireless healthcare scenarios. Finally, the paper ends up with a summary of open security research issues that need to be explored for future healthcare applications using WMSNs.

E-SAP: Efficient-Strong Authentication Protocol for Healthcare Applications Using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

A wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) can sense humans’ physiological signs without sacrificing patient comfort and transmit patient vital signs to health professionals’ hand-held devices. The patient physiological data are highly sensitive and WMSNs are extremely vulnerable to many attacks. Therefore, it must be ensured that patients’ medical signs are not exposed to unauthorized users. Consequently, strong user authentication is the main concern for the success and large scale deployment of WMSNs. In this regard, this paper presents an efficient, strong authentication protocol, named E-SAP, for healthcare application using WMSNs. The proposed E-SAP includes: (1) a two-factor (i.e., password and smartcard) professional authentication; (2) mutual authentication between the professional and the medical sensor; (3) symmetric encryption/decryption for providing message confidentiality; (4) establishment of a secure session key at the end of authentication; and (5) professionals can change their password. Further, the proposed protocol requires three message exchanges between the professional, medical sensor node and gateway node, and achieves efficiency (i.e., low computation and communication cost). Through the formal analysis, security analysis and performance analysis, we demonstrate that E-SAP is more secure against many practical attacks, and allows a tradeoff between the security and the performance cost for healthcare application using WMSNs.

The LILI-II Keystream Generator

The LILI-II keystream generator is a LFSR based synchronous stream cipher with a 128 bit key. LILI-II is a specific cipher from the LILI family of keystream generators, and was designed with larger internal components than previous ciphers in this class, in order to provide increased security. The design offers large period and linear complexity, is immune to currently known styles of attack, and is simple to implement in hardware or software. The cipher achieves a security level of 128 bits.

Dragon: a fast word based stream cipher

This paper presents Dragon, a new stream cipher constructed using a single word based non-linear feedback shift register and a non-linear filter function with memory. Dragon uses a variable length key and initialisation vector of 128 or 256 bits, and produces 64 bits of keystream per iteration. At the heart of Dragon are two highly optimised 8 × 32 s-boxes. Dragon uses simple operations on 32-bit words to provide a high degree of efficiency in a wide variety of environments, making it highly competitive when compared with other word based stream ciphers. The components of Dragon are designed to resist all known attacks.

Secure storage and access of data in cloud computing

Cloud computing is the most demanded advanced technology throughout the world. It is one of the most significant topic whose application is being researched in todays time. One of the prominent services offered in cloud computing is the cloud storage. With the cloud storage, data is stored on multiple third party servers, rather than on the dedicated server used in traditional networked data storage. All data stored on multiple third party servers is not cared by the user and no one knows where exactly data saved. It is cared by the cloud storage provider that claims that they can protect the data but no one believes them. Data stored over cloud and flow through network in the plain text format is security threat. This paper proposes a method that allows user to store and access the data securely from the cloud storage. It also guarantees that no one except the authenticated user can access the data neither the cloud storage provider. This method ensures the security and privacy of data stored on cloud. A further advantage of this method is that if there is security breach at the cloud provider, the users data will continue to be secure since all data is encrypted. Users also need not to worry about cloud providers gaining access to their data illegally.

Symmetric Encryption in RFID Authentication Protocol for Strong Location Privacy and Forward-Security

RFID tag carries vital information in their operation and thus concerns on privacy and security issues do arise. The problem of traceability is critical in open radio frequency environments. An adversary can trace and interact with tag and this is referred as tracking. Nevertheless, with a strong authentication mechanism, uprising security problems in RFID systems can be solved. We had demonstrated current vulnerabilities and proposed our authentication mechanism to overcome them. As long as the secret information stays secret, tag forgery is not possible. Targeting RFID tag with short tag ID, we employ a resource friendly symmetric encryption scheme, which is a stream cipher building block to enhance the security features in active type RFID tag.

On an improved summation generator with 2-bit memory

Abstract The summation generator is a real adder generator with a maximum period, near-maximum linear complexity and maximum order of correlation immunity. However it is neither secure against and nor immune to correlation attack between its output sequences and carry sequences in special cases. A modified summation generator, secure against such an attack, has recently been proposed, but no proof is given about its period and linear complexity. In this paper, we propose a new modified summation generator immune to correlation attack. Moreover, we conclude that its period is maximum and that its linear complexity is the same as that of the original summation generator.

Security Analysis and Improvements of Authentication and Access Control in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things is a ubiquitous concept where physical objects are connected over the internet and are provided with unique identifiers to enable their self-identification to other devices and the ability to continuously generate data and transmit it over a network. Hence, the security of the network, data and sensor devices is a paramount concern in the IoT network as it grows very fast in terms of exchanged data and interconnected sensor nodes. This paper analyses the authentication and access control method using in the Internet of Things presented by Jing et al (Authentication and Access Control in the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 2012 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, Macau, China, 18–21 June 2012, pp. 588–592). According to our analysis, Jing et al.s protocol is costly in the message exchange and the security assessment is not strong enough for such a protocol. Therefore, we propose improvements to the protocol to fill the discovered weakness gaps. The protocol enhancements facilitate many services to the users such as user anonymity, mutual authentication, and secure session key establishment. Finally, the performance and security analysis show that the improved protocol possesses many advantages against popular attacks, and achieves better efficiency at low communication cost.

Online banking authentication system using mobile-OTP with QR-code

As a high-speed internet infrastructure is being developed and people are informationized, the financial tasks are also engaged in internet field. However, the existing internet banking system was exposed to the danger of hacking. Recently, the personal information has been leaked by a high-degree method such as Phishing or Pharming beyond snatching a users ID and Password. Seeing that most of examples which happened in the domestic financial agencies were caused by the appropriation of ID or Password belonging to others, a safe user confirmation system gets much more essential. In this paper, we propose a new Online Banking Authentication system. This authentication system used Mobile OTP with the combination of QR-code which is a variant of the 2D barcode.

Indoor Location Tracking Using Received Signal Strength Indicator

The development pace of location tracking research is highly tied up with the advancement of wireless sensor network (WSN) and wireless technologies. As sensor nodes in WSN became smaller and stronger, the ability of processing information and managing network operation also became more intelligent. This can be observed from the application of tracking from coarse-grained to fine-grained advancement. In coarse-grained tracking such as (Zhao, et al., 2003), the location of target is just detected by two or more sensor nodes along the movement path of the target. The coordinate of the tracked target is then determined by averaging the location coordinates of those sensor nodes which are able to detect the target. Using this approach, the accuracy and resolution of location estimation is affected by the density of sensor nodes in the area. In fine-grained tracking such as (Smith, et al., 2004), three or more sensor nodes are responsible to track the target in the area. Instead of just detection, the distances between the target and the sensor nodes are measured. The determination of distance between two entities is called “ranging”. Using the measured distances, the exact location coordinate of the target can be computed by angulation or lateration techniques (Hightower, et al., 2001). Therefore, increasing the node density of the area does not really increase the accuracy of location estimation. It rather depends on the accuracy of the ranging method. This chapter presents the authors’ research investigation of developing an indoor tracking and localization system. The experimental system was tested and achieved in the laboratory of Dongseo University for supporting author’s PhD studies. The thesis (Pu, 2009) provides further technical details for the design and implementation of the tracking system. For the ease of reading, this chapter was organized as follows: section 1 gives overall fundamentals of location tracking systems, from every aspect of considerations. Section 2 analyzes the nature of wireless ranging using received signal strength indicator, especially for the case of indoor signal propagation and ranging. Section 3 provides the complete flow of designing and implementing indoor location system based on received signal strength. Finally, section 4 concludes the whole work. 11