Vulnerabilities and verification of cryptographic protocols and their future in Wireless Body Area Networks

In network security goals such as confidentiality, authentication, integrity and non-repudiation can be achieved using cryptographic techniques. Cryptographic techniques are techniques to hide information from unauthorized persons. The fact is, even when strong cryptographic algorithms and protocols are applied, the security of communication systems cannot be guaranteed [1]. Since cryptographic protocols can contain several types of flaws and vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers, cryptographic verification for suitability is needed to detect all possible flaws and attacks against them. In Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) the cryptographic implementation comes at the expense of performance and power conservation making engineering of security protocols suitable for low powered networks a challenging task. This paper will discuss the possible flaws and attacks on cryptographic protocols, verification methods to detect these flaws and investigate the implementation of these protocols in the WBANs.