Secure Data Delivery in a Software-Defined Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

High security solutions are highly important in wireless medical environments, since patient data is confidential, sensitive and must be transmitted over a secure connection. Accordingly, a hybrid encryption method is proposed to ensure data confidentiality (RSA-2048 for key exchange using ACL in SDN with the addition of AES-256-CTR and a hashed secret key for data encryption), and the encrypted data is stored in a private blockchain with the DBFT consensus algorithm to ensure the integrity of data before it being accessed by a doctor's application which decrypts and displays the relevant information. The system was programmed using Python, in an NS3.37 simulator installed on Ubuntu with a MySQL database created using the Apache XAMPP. The product turned out to be a highly secure system for transmitting data from a medical sensor to the doctor's application, offering a throughput of approximately 9 Gbps for both encryption and decryption tasks, while the processing time equaled 0.014 µs per a 128-bit block size for both encryption and decryption, with latency amounting to 0.14 s per 1 KB of data, and the blockchain agreement time equaling 4 ms per 1 KB.

Keywords

• blockchain
• SDN
• SD-WBAN
• WBAN