Secure data communication using file hierarchy attribute based encryption in wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) play an important role in healthcare system by enabling medical experts to guide patients remotely. The unauthorized access of medical data from WBAN controller as well as the unreliable data communication may leads to risk for patients life. Currently, Chunqiang Hu et al., [1] proposed a data communication protocol by using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) for a single file. The major limitation of Chunqiang Hu et al., [1] is that as the number of files increases, CP-ABE will suffer from parameters such as message size, energy consumption and computation cost. This paper proposes a more secure and efficient data communication scheme for WBANs by using an efficient File Hierarchy CP-ABE (FH-CP-ABE). The proposed scheme uses integrated access structure which is a combination of two or more access structures with hierarchical files encrypted. We evaluate the performance analysis of the proposed data communication protocol in terms of message size, energy consumption, computation cost and compared with Chunqiang Hu et al., [1].