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Double threshold authentication using body area radio channel characteristics

  • Nan Zhao
    ,
  • Aifeng Ren
    ,
  • Fangming Hu
    ,
  • Zhiya Zhang
    ,
  • Masood Ur-Rehman
    ,
  • Tianqiao Zhu
  • Xidian University
    ,
  • Queen Mary University of London
Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Open access

Abstract

The demand of portable and body-worn devices for remote health monitoring is ever increasing. One of the major challenges caused by this influx of wireless body area network (WBAN) devices is security of user's extremely vital and personal information. Conventional authentication techniques implemented at upper layers of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model usually consumes huge amount of power. They also require significant changes at hardware and software levels. It makes them unsuitable for inherently low powered WBAN devices. This letter investigates the usability of a double threshold algorithm as a physical layer security measure in these scenarios. The algorithm is based on the user's behavioral fingerprint extracted from the radio channel characteristics. Effectiveness of this technique is established through experimental measurements considering a variety of common usage scenarios. The results show that this method provides high level of security against false authentication attacks and has great potential in WBANs.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 2099-2102

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

IEEE Communications Letters (Volume 20, Issue 10)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 06/06/2016

Publication status

Published - 06/06/2016

ISSN

1089-7798

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/623894
  • Scopus: 84992183848

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