Assessing the state of security of Medical BANs and the IEEE 802.15.6 standard

Master thesis (2021)

Authors

G. Hahn Mechanical Engineering

Contributors

C. Strydis Bio-Electronics - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
W.A. Serdijn Bio-Electronics - EEMCS (supervisor 2)
M.A. Siddiqi Electronics - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Mechanical Engineering
Copyright: © 2021 Georg Hahn
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

02-07-2021

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

Medical Body Area Networks (MBANs) are a cluster of possibly heterogeneous devices, communicating with each other in, on or around the human body. Through these devices, medical data is collected, processed in some way and transferred outside of the network. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard aims to govern communications between such devices. It includes a set of constraints for physical features and communication on the PHY and MAC level, as well as association/ disassociation protocols and security services that applications need to comply with. Given the high sensitivity of the medical data transmitted via MBANs, network security is crucial. This thesis consists of three main contributions: (a) a structured procedure to analyse the security features of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard by using realistic hypothetical scenarios is introduced (b) a thorough security analysis of the standard is conducted (c) recommendations on how to improve the security posture of the standard are given.