Compact cryptoprocessor for securing wireless communications in FECG portable instrumentation

Portable healthcare instruments with wireless communications capabilities provide a valuable tool for physicians, enabling long-term monitoring of biosignals, while maintaining high levels of comfort for the patients. Nevertheless, the security and privacy of the communications between the instrument and the representation, storing or analysis devices must be preserved. In this paper, a hardware cryptosystem based on an stream cypher, together with elliptic key cryptography for key exchange, is proposed. The Trivium algorithm, proposed by the eSTREAM project as a widespread option for streaming ciphering has been selected, and a specific ECC cryptosystem has been developed for this application in order to maintain reduced area and power consumption.