IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2019 - 39

Table 1. Comparison between cryptographic methods.
Cryptographic method

Complexity

Performance analysis

Number of keys

Symmetric key-based
cryptographic methods

SKC has an advantage of
simple implementation
in comparison with PKC,
as they use the similar
key at source and
destination nodes

Their processing and
encryption time is faster
than PKC because they
are not complicated and
easy to perform.

SKC-based operations
apply one key to encrypt
and to decrypt
information.

RC4, AES, QUAD

Public key-based
cryptography methods

PKC is more
complicated than SKC
because they utilize
distinct keys for
encryption and
decryption.

They require more
resources than SKC
because of usage of
different keys for
encryption and
decryption procedures.

PKC consists of two keys
(public and private).

RSA, DSA, ECC

CRYPTOGRAPHIC SECURITY FOR
WBSNS
Several cryptographic security methods are
available for smart healthcare. They are further
divided into two types Public Key Cryptography
(PKC) and Symmetric Key Cryptography (SKC).
The comparisons between SKC and PKC are
shown in Table 1. SKC is a favorable candidate
while considering security in WBSNs due to their
resource economic nature (Table 2).6,7

BIOMETRIC SECURITY FOR
HEALTHCARE
The biometric features acquired from biosignals posses properties of distinctiveness and
randomness.4,8 Consequently, they can be used
to develop security mechanisms for smart
healthcare systems.
Bio-key Generation: The Inter-Pulse Intervals
(IPIs) extracted from heartbeats are used generating secret keys for securing WBSNs. The keys
are distributed to nodes within the WBSNs, as

Common algorithms

DES, 3DES

Diffie-Hellman El Gamal

well as nodes outside the WBSNs, thus necessitating secured data transmission in such remote
healthcare platforms.4
Fuzzy-Vault based Entity Identifications: Security problems in WBSNs are addressed by several
fuzzy vault based approaches in which intrinsic
characteristics of the human body are used for
EIs generation (Table 3).9-12
Biometric Key Distribution: Fuzzy vault requires a large amount of processing time, memory,
and energy consumption to generate random
chaff points at the source node and computing
the secret keys at the destination node. Therefore,
it is very necessary to develop low-power security
mechanisms for keys distribution at all sensor
nodes in order to use SKC for securing WBSNs.

FUTURE RESEARCH CHALLENGES
AND SOLUTIONS
Time-Domain Features for Heartbeats for
Smart Healthcare Security: For smart healthcare

Table 2. Comparison of different SKC.
Parameters

DES

3DES

AES

RC4

RC5

Blowfish

Block size (bits)

128

40-2048

variable

Key size (bits)

112 or 118

128

variable

0-2040

32-448

Structure

Feistel

Substitution,
Permutation

Feistel

Round

variable

256

Features

Not structure,
Enough

Adequate
Security

Replacement
for DES,
Excellent
Security

Fast cipher in
SSL

Good security

Excellent
Security

September/October 2019

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2019