Securing data provenance in body area networks using lightweight wireless link fingerprints

Wireless bodyworn sensing devices are becoming popular for fitness, sports training and personalized healthcare applications. In this paper, we demonstrate a mechanism to secure data provenance for these devices by exploiting symmetric spatio-temporal characteristics of the wireless link between two communicating parties. Our solution enables both parties to generate closely matching 'link' fingerprints which uniquely associate a data session with a wireless link such that a third party, at a later date, can verify the links the data was communicated on. These fingerprints are unique, they are very hard for an eavesdropper to forge, lightweight compared to traditional provenance mechanisms, and allow for certain interesting security properties such as system accountability and non-repudiation.