Privacy-preserving wireless medical sensor network

In a wireless medical sensor network, the sensitive patient data is transmitted through the open air. It is more vulnerable to eavesdropping, spoofing, altering and replaying attacks, compared with the wired network. Some work has been done to secure the wireless medical sensor network using efficient symmetric key cryptosystems. The efforts can protect the patient data during transmission, but cannot stop the inside attack where the administrator of the patient database reveals the sensitive patient data. To prevent from the inside attack, more advanced cryptographic techniques, such as attribute-based encryption, may be used. However, it is too expensive to implement the techniques in the wireless sensor networks with low-power and low-cost sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a practical approach to prevent from the inside attack by using Sharemind system, developed by Cybernetica to perform computations on input data without compromising its privacy. This paper has two main contributions. One contribution is proposing a lightweight encryption algorithm to protect the communication between the sensor node and the Sharemind system. Another contribution is employing Sharemind system to protect patient data privacy and support medical research.