Deriving cryptographic keys from physiological signals

Abstract

Biosensors aim at providing pervasive healthcare by collecting and communicating highly sensitive medical information. Due to their extreme limitations, lightweight and secure key management infrastructures are required. For this reason, biosensors use physiological parameters that are generated from different vital signals (i.e., electrocardiogram, photoplethysmogram, blood pressure) to protect the exchanged private health information. In this paper, we define two novel physiological parameter generation techniques and analyze both the performance and the quality of the outcomes. Our results show that we generate good candidates of physiological parameters that can be used as cryptographic keys to secure the communication among the biosensors.