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A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) allows the integration of intelligent, miniaturized, low-power sensor nodes in, on, or around a human body to monitor body functions and the surrounding environment. It has great potential to revolutionize the future of healthcare technology and has attracted a number of researchers both from the academia and industry in the past few years. WBANs support a wide range of medical and Consumer Electronics (CE) applications. For example, WBANs provide remote health monitoring of patients for a long period of time without any restriction on his/her normal activities [1,2].

Different nodes such as Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electromyography (EMG), and Electroencephalography (EEG) are deployed on the human body to collect the physiological parameters and forward them to a remote medical server for further analysis as given in Figure 1.

Generally WBAN consists of in-body and on-body area networks. An in-body area network allows communication between invasive/implanted devices and a base station. An on-body area network, on the other hand, allows communication between non-invasive/wearable devices and a base station.Figure 1.WBAN architecture for medical applications.The consideration of WBANs for medical and non-medical applications must satisfy stringent security and privacy requirements. These requirements are based on different applications ranging from medical (heart monitoring) to non-medical (listening to MP4) applications [3].

In case of medical applications, the security threats may lead a patient to a dangerous condition, and sometimes to death.

Thus, a strict and Entinostat scalable security mechanism is required to prevent malicious interaction with WBAN. A secure WBAN should include confidentiality and privacy, integrity and authentication, key establishment and trust set-up, secure group management and data aggregation. However, the integration of a Dacomitinib high-level security mechanism in a low-power and resource-constrained sensor node increases the computational, communication and management costs.

In WBANs, both security and system performance are equally important, and thus, designing a low-power and secure WBAN system is a fundamental challenge to the designers. In this paper, we present a brief discussion on the major security requirements and threats in WBANs at the Physical, Medium Access Control (MAC), Network, and Transport layers. We analyze the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 [4,5] security framework for WBAN using extensive simulations. Different types of attack on IEEE 802.15.4 superframe are considered in the simulations.