TY - GEN
T1 - On using a von neumann extractor in heart-beat-based security
AU - Seepers, Robert Mark
AU - Strydis, Christos
AU - Sourdis, Ioannis
AU - De Zeeuw, Chris Innocentius
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - The Inter-Pulse-Interval (IPI) of heart beats has previously been suggested for facilitating security in mobile health (mHealth) applications. In heart-beat-based security, a security key is derived from the time difference between consecutive heart beats. As two entities that simultaneously sample the same heart beats may generate the same key (with some inter-key disparity), these keys may be used for various security functions, such as entity authentication or data confidentiality. One of the key limitations in heart-beat-based security is the low randomness intrinsic to the most-significant bits (MSBs) in the digital representation of each IPI. In this paper, we explore the use of a von Neumann entropy extractor on these MSBs in order to increase their randomness. We show that our von Neumann key-generator produces significantly more random bits than a non-extracting key generator with an average bit-extraction rate between 13.4% and 21.9%. Despite this increase in randomness, we also find a substantial increase in inter-key disparity, increasing the mismatch tolerance required for a given true-key pair. Accordingly, the maximum-attainable effective key-strength of our key generator is only slightly higher than that of a non-extracting generator (16.4 bits compared to 15.2 bits of security for a 60-bit key), while the former requires an increase in average key-generation time of 2.5x.
AB - The Inter-Pulse-Interval (IPI) of heart beats has previously been suggested for facilitating security in mobile health (mHealth) applications. In heart-beat-based security, a security key is derived from the time difference between consecutive heart beats. As two entities that simultaneously sample the same heart beats may generate the same key (with some inter-key disparity), these keys may be used for various security functions, such as entity authentication or data confidentiality. One of the key limitations in heart-beat-based security is the low randomness intrinsic to the most-significant bits (MSBs) in the digital representation of each IPI. In this paper, we explore the use of a von Neumann entropy extractor on these MSBs in order to increase their randomness. We show that our von Neumann key-generator produces significantly more random bits than a non-extracting key generator with an average bit-extraction rate between 13.4% and 21.9%. Despite this increase in randomness, we also find a substantial increase in inter-key disparity, increasing the mismatch tolerance required for a given true-key pair. Accordingly, the maximum-attainable effective key-strength of our key generator is only slightly higher than that of a non-extracting generator (16.4 bits compared to 15.2 bits of security for a 60-bit key), while the former requires an increase in average key-generation time of 2.5x.
KW - Biometrics
KW - Heart-beat-based security
KW - Implantable Medical Devices
KW - Inter-pulse interval
KW - MHealth
KW - Security
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84966781444
U2 - 10.1109/Trustcom.2015.411
DO - 10.1109/Trustcom.2015.411
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84966781444
T3 - Proceedings - 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2015
SP - 491
EP - 498
BT - Proceedings - 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2015
PB - IEEE
T2 - 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2015
Y2 - 20 August 2015 through 22 August 2015
ER -