Peak misdetection in heart-beat-based security: Characterization and tolerance
Paper in proceeding, 2014

The Inter-Pulse-Interval (IPI) of heart beats has previously been suggested for security in mobile health (mHealth) applications. In IPI-based security, secure communication is facilitated through a security key derived from the time difference between heart beats. However, there currently exists no work which considers the effect on security of imperfect heart-beat (peak) detection. This is a crucial aspect of IPI-based security and likely to happen in a real system. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of peak misdetection on the security performance of IPI-based security. It is shown that even with a high peak detection rate between 99.9% and 99.0%, a significant drop in security performance may be observed (between -70% and -303%) compared to having perfect peak detection. We show that authenticating using smaller keys yields both stronger keys as well as potentially faster authentication in case of imperfect heart beat detection. Finally, we present an algorithm which tolerates the effect of a single misdetected peak and increases the security performance by up to 155%.

Author

R.M. Seepers

Erasmus University Rotterdam

C. Strydis

Erasmus University Rotterdam

P. Peris-Lopez

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Ioannis Sourdis

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

C.I. De Zeeuw

Erasmus University Rotterdam

36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2014; Chicago; United States; 26 August 2014 through 30 August 2014

5401-5405
978-142447929-0 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

DOI

10.1109/EMBC.2014.6944847

ISBN

978-142447929-0

More information

Latest update

12/1/2020