Design and analysis of lightweight block ciphers for wban applications

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is emerging as a key technology to enable real-time health monitoring for humans in their quest for a healthy lifestyle and early diagnosis of life threatening diseases. In such a network, information security is essential to sustain integrity, privacy and confidentiality of an individual s health data. The WBAN sensor modules in proximity to the patient/individual are generally low profile resource constrained entities and are also more vulnerable to security attacks. As such, new trends for providing security for embedded system implementation are emerging; many of which use cryptographic computations or make use of lightweight crypto-systems, feasible for these resource constrained computing platforms. The Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) is a field of study in information security, that deals with altered lightweight mechanisms in the existing cryptographic methodologies to reach stable outcomes with the imposed constraints of reduced components usage, time consumption, power consumption and memory requirement. Lightweight mechanisms have been developed in the existing research works for securing the confidential information. However the limitations like increased components usage, time consumption, power consumption and memory requirement still exists. Also, the existing techniques utilize the same type of key generation and pattern generation approaches for all kinds of data, which leads to reduced security. These issues are addressed in this thesis work, by developing a new LWC mechanism for medical image encryption using the Differential Logical Pattern (DLP) algorithm. In this algorithm, a medical image is taken as input for encryption and is processed in blocks, the random key and S-box are generated from a set of randomly selected images by extracting the patterns from the image. Then, the DLP appliance is exploited to encode the input blocks before conveying it to the receiver. newline