Body Area Networks (BAN) have caused wide interest in academic and industrial areas in recent years due to the strong demands of health condition monitoring by people. Consequently, security becomes a critical consideration, which restricts the development of BAN while the data transferring in BAN is increasingly significant and their privacy is of the utmost importance. Therefore, an ASIC implementation of security scheme for BAN is proposed by the authors, based on the IEEE standard 802.15.6, which is synthesized using the SIMC 65nm CMOS technology.

In recent years, the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) concept has attracted significant academic and industrial attention. WBAN specifies a network dedicated to collecting personal biomedical data from advanced sensors that are then used for health and lifestyle purposes. In 2012, the 802.15.6 WBAN standard was released by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which regulates and specifies the configurations of WBAN. Compared to the prevailing wireless communication technologies such as Bluetooth and ZigBee, the WBAN standard has the advantages of ultra-low power consumption, high reliability, and high-security protection while transmitting sensitive personal data. Based on the standard specification, several implementations have been published. However, in terms of evaluation, different designs were implemented in proprietary evaluation environments, which may lead to unfair comparison. In this paper, a Software-Defined Radio (SDR) evaluation platform for WBAN systems is proposed to evaluate the RF channel specified in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. A narrowband communication protocol demonstration with a security scheme in WBAN has been performed to successfully validate the design in the proposed evaluation platform.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has demonstrated promising growth, as it is crucial to numerous application domains in smart ecosystems, such as the smart city. Decentralization can help achieve growth, with previous research proposing the use of decentralized blockchain technology in IoT ecosystems as, among others, it can offer cryptographically trustworthy interactions, non-repudiable smart contracts, and interoperability between stakeholders. However, proposals are often theoretical or very specific to IoT ecosystem sub-areas, for instance, healthcare. In both cases, implementation may not be feasible in a larger ecosystem. This paper investigates the performance, particularly throughput, aspect of feasibility. It proposes and demonstrates a platform that uses blockchain technology as a building block in an IoT ecosystem. A permissioned blockchain network is built, performance is measured, and the measurements are interpreted in a smart city context, thus providing valuable insights about real-world implementations and their degree of feasibility.

Securing the access in networks is a first-order concern that only gains importance with the advent of Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, a security system is presented for password-free access over the secured link. It makes the connection faster than manual authentication and facilitates Machine-to-Machine (M2M) secure interactions, as required for IoT. The authentication procedure includes the exchange of certificate and challenge/response pairs, which are stored and computed in an external security coprocessor. The system enforces the authentication protocol, includes error detection, and handles multiple devices according to their Operating Systems (OS) through their connections/ disconnections. It also performs encryption, if necessary. It is applicable on application level for devices, including IoT based devices, sensors, Android, and iOS-based smartphones. The devices that have the correct certificate and can solve the challenge can connect to the network linked with the security system. The system security is hardened because the sensitive authentication elements such as keys, certificates, and challenge responses are invisible to users and are exchanged only using strong hashing algorithms that are irreversible. The proposed hardware security system can augment any supporting network, converting the entire insecure network into a secured one, as well as retrofit existing insecure Bluetooth devices for secure access. The system incurs low overhead in time and energy by performing security operations in an ASIC coprocessor, and can be shared to secure access to multiple devices, which reduces both energy and cost.