REISCH: incorporating lightweight and reliable algorithms into healthcare applications of WSNs

Healthcare institutions require advanced technology to collect patients' data accurately and continuously. The tradition technologies still suffer from two problems: performance and security efficiency. The existing research has serious drawbacks when using public-key mechanisms such as digital signature algorithms. In this paper, we propose Reliable and Efficient Integrity Scheme for Data Collection in HWSN (REISCH) to alleviate these problems by using secure and lightweight signature algorithms. The results of the performance analysis indicate that our scheme provides high efficiency in data integration between sensors and server (saves more than 24% of alive sensors compared to traditional algorithms). Additionally, we use Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) to validate the security procedures in our scheme. Security analysis results confirm that REISCH is safe against some well-known attacks

Certificateless Algorithm for Body Sensor Network and Remote Medical Server Units Authentication over Public Wireless Channels

Wireless sensor networks process and exchange mission-critical data relating to patients’ health status. Obviously, any leakages of the sensed data can have serious consequences which can endanger the lives of patients. As such, there is need for strong security and privacy protection of the data in storage as well as the data in transit. Over the recent past, researchers have developed numerous security protocols based on digital signatures, advanced encryption standard, digital certificates and elliptic curve cryptography among other approaches. However, previous studies have shown the existence of many security and privacy gaps that can be exploited by attackers to cause some harm in these networks. In addition, some techniques such as digital certificates have high storage and computation complexities occasioned by certificate and public key management issues. In this paper, a certificateless algorithm is developed for authenticating the body sensors and remote medical server units. Security analysis has shown that it offers data privacy, secure session key agreement, untraceability and anonymity. It can also withstand typical wireless sensor networks attacks such as impersonation, packet replay and man-in-the-middle. On the other hand, it is demonstrated to have the least execution time and bandwidth requirements

Security for the Industrial IoT: The Case for Information-Centric Networking

Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inter-networking of critical industrial components in a safe and secure manner. In this paper, we analyze the potentials of ICN for providing a secure and robust networking solution for constrained controllers in industrial safety systems. We showcase hazardous gas sensing in widespread industrial environments, such as refineries, and compare with IP-based approaches such as CoAP and MQTT. Our findings indicate that the content-centric security model, as well as enhanced DoS resistance are important arguments for deploying Information Centric Networking in a safety-critical industrial IoT. Evaluation of the crypto efforts on the RIOT operating system for content security reveal its feasibility for common deployment scenarios.Comment: To be published at IEEE WF-IoT 201

A Comprehensive Survey on Signcryption Security Mechanisms in Wireless Body Area Networks

WBANs (Wireless Body Area Networks) are frequently depicted as a paradigm shift in healthcare from traditional to modern E-Healthcare. The vitals of the patient signs by the sensors are highly sensitive, secret, and vulnerable to numerous adversarial attacks. Since WBANs is a real-world application of the healthcare system, it’s vital to ensure that the data acquired by the WBANs sensors is secure and not accessible to unauthorized parties or security hazards. As a result, effective signcryption security solutions are required for the WBANs’ success and widespread use. Over the last two decades, researchers have proposed a slew of signcryption security solutions to achieve this goal. The lack of a clear and unified study in terms of signcryption solutions can offer a bird’s eye view of WBANs. Based on the most recent signcryption papers, we analyzed WBAN’s communication architecture, security requirements, and the primary problems in WBANs to meet the aforementioned objectives. This survey also includes the most up to date signcryption security techniques in WBANs environments. By identifying and comparing all available signcryption techniques in the WBANs sector, the study will aid the academic community in understanding security problems and causes. The goal of this survey is to provide a comparative review of the existing signcryption security solutions and to analyze the previously indicated solution given for WBANs. A multi-criteria decision-making approach is used for a comparative examination of the existing signcryption solutions. Furthermore, the survey also highlights some of the public research issues that researchers must face to develop the security features of WBANs.publishedVersio

Towards end-to-end security in internet of things based healthcare

Healthcare IoT systems are distinguished in that they are designed to serve human beings, which primarily raises the requirements of security, privacy, and reliability. Such systems have to provide real-time notifications and responses concerning the status of patients. Physicians, patients, and other caregivers demand a reliable system in which the results are accurate and timely, and the service is reliable and secure. To guarantee these requirements, the smart components in the system require a secure and efficient end-to-end communication method between the end-points (e.g., patients, caregivers, and medical sensors) of a healthcare IoT system. The main challenge faced by the existing security solutions is a lack of secure end-to-end communication. This thesis addresses this challenge by presenting a novel end-to-end security solution enabling end-points to securely and efficiently communicate with each other. The proposed solution meets the security requirements of a wide range of healthcare IoT systems while minimizing the overall hardware overhead of end-to-end communication. End-to-end communication is enabled by the holistic integration of the following contributions. The first contribution is the implementation of two architectures for remote monitoring of bio-signals. The first architecture is based on a low power IEEE 802.15.4 protocol known as ZigBee. It consists of a set of sensor nodes to read data from various medical sensors, process the data, and send them wirelessly over ZigBee to a server node. The second architecture implements on an IP-based wireless sensor network, using IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The system consists of a IEEE 802.11 based sensor module to access bio-signals from patients and send them over to a remote server. In both architectures, the server node collects the health data from several client nodes and updates a remote database. The remote webserver accesses the database and updates the webpage in real-time, which can be accessed remotely. The second contribution is a novel secure mutual authentication scheme for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implant systems. The proposed scheme relies on the elliptic curve cryptography and the D-Quark lightweight hash design. The scheme consists of three main phases: (1) reader authentication and verification, (2) tag identification, and (3) tag verification. We show that among the existing public-key crypto-systems, elliptic curve is the optimal choice due to its small key size as well as its efficiency in computations. The D-Quark lightweight hash design has been tailored for resource-constrained devices. The third contribution is proposing a low-latency and secure cryptographic keys generation approach based on Electrocardiogram (ECG) features. This is performed by taking advantage of the uniqueness and randomness properties of ECG's main features comprising of PR, RR, PP, QT, and ST intervals. This approach achieves low latency due to its reliance on reference-free ECG's main features that can be acquired in a short time. The approach is called Several ECG Features (SEF)-based cryptographic key generation. The fourth contribution is devising a novel secure and efficient end-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare IoT. The proposed scheme consists of: (1) a secure and efficient end-user authentication and authorization architecture based on the certificate based Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) handshake protocol, (2) a secure end-to-end communication method based on DTLS session resumption, and (3) support for robust mobility based on interconnected smart gateways in the fog layer. Finally, the fifth and the last contribution is the analysis of the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions in healthcare IoT systems including our end-to-end security solution. In this regard, we first identify and present the essential requirements of robust security solutions for healthcare IoT systems. We then analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions (including our scheme) by developing a prototype healthcare IoT system