Non-intrusive and ambulatory health monitoring of patients' vital signs over Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) provides an economical solution to rising costs in the healthcare system. However, due to the lack of security in the operation and communication of resource-constrained medical sensor nodes, the health and medical information provided by the WBANs may not be trusted. To address this issue, lightweight security solutions that are suitable for capability and resource limited body sensor devices must be provided to authenticate the data transmission. The goal of this research project is to develop a lightweight authentication system for resource-constrained WBANs. Findings from the proposed project will provide support for ensuring real-time delivery of accurate and secure medical information in WBANs. The proposed research will also advance the fields of WBANs and trustworthy biomedical computing for healthcare applications. The proposed theories, models, and simulation code can be used by engineers and researchers to design and evaluate security mechanisms for WBAN applications. In addition, an important education objective tightly coupled with the proposed research is to recruit and educate future generation of WBAN engineers. This will be accomplished through curriculum development, student mentoring, and community outreach in these fast changing technical fields of WBAN system engineering, security and mobile health (mHealth). The proposed research aims at realizing physical layer security approaches for WBANs and developing innovative key agreement and message authentication mechanisms. Unlike existing approaches (e.g., biometric-based approaches), the proposed authentication system does not require additional hardware, error reconciliation process and bit synchronization, and thus is suitable for resource-constrained and capacity-limited medical sensor nodes in WBANs. The proposed research tasks include (1) theoretical studies; (2) design of key agreement schemes; (3) development of message authentication system; and (4) system implementation and validation. The theoretical studies focus on the connections between the channel reciprocity, channel dependency and key generation. Based on the results of theoretical studies, practical key agreement schemes that use a set of dynamic wireless channel features among the communication partners will be developed. The project will then design a lightweight authentication system that is adaptive to wireless channels for securing medical data transmission in WBANs. Finally, the project will implement the proposed physical layer security approach in a real resource-constrained WBANs system and investigate the practical system performance limit through experiments. The findings from the project can provide guidelines for physical-channel based security system design and deployment of WBAN applications.
Honggang Wang is the "Scholar of The Year" (2016, only one per year at UMass Dartmouth). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2009. His research interests include Internet of Things, Wireless Health, Body Area Networks (BAN), Cyber and Multimedia Security, Mobile Multimedia and Cloud, Wireless Networks and Cyber-physical System, and BIG DATA in mHealth. He has published more than 150 papers in his research areas. He was an invited participant by National Academic Engineering (NAE) for 2017 German-American Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, as one of about 50 outstanding engineers (ages 30-45) from US companies, universities, and government labs. He has served as the general chair/co-chair and TPC chair/co-chairs for several IEEE/ACM conferences. He also serves as the steering committee co-chair of IEEE CHASE and TPC co-chair of of IEEE CHASE 2016, which is a leading international conference in the field of connected health. He served as the TPC member for IEEE INFOCOM 2013-2015, IEEE ICDCS 2015, IEEE ICDM 2018, ACM Multimedia 2017 and area chair for IEEE ICME 2016 and 2017. He has also been serving as the Associate Editor in Chief (EiC) for IEEE Internet of Things journal (SCI impact factor: 9.5), associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Big Data, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Associate Editor of IEEE network Magazine. He currently serves as the Vice chair of IEEE eHealth Technical Committee and the Chair of IEEE Comsoc Multimedia Communications Technical committee (IEEE MMTC). He received IEEE Multimedia Communications Technical Committee (MMTC) Outstanding Leadership Award (2015) and IEEE HEALTHCOM 2015 Outstanding Service Award. His research is supported by NSF, DoT, NIH, UMass President office, and UMass Healey Grant. He is an IEEE distinguished lecturer.
CCSS: Collaborative Research: Developing A Physical-Channel Based Lightweight Authentication System for Wireless Body Area Networks