Lightweight Authentication Scheme for IoT Based E-Healthcare Service Communication

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Cybersecurity in Healthcare
• Internet of Things (IoT)

Background:

• Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) via Electronic Healthcare (E-health) facilitates proactive patient care and early detection of health issues like arrhythmias.
• Vulnerabilities in IoT wearable device security, such as pacemakers, pose risks of cyberattacks, potentially corrupting data and hindering patient care.
• Ensuring secure communication is critical for the reliability and effectiveness of E-health services.

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the security challenges in wearable IoT devices used for healthcare.
• To propose and evaluate a Lightweight Key Agreement (LKA) based authentication scheme for secure Device-to-Device (D2D) communication in E-health.
• To enhance the reliability of healthcare services by securing wearable devices.

Main Methods:

• Development of a Lightweight Key Agreement (LKA) scheme utilizing a Network Key Manager for edge-based key generation and device validation.
• Implementation of certificate-based authentication for devices, reducing network communication overhead.
• Utilizing E-health mobile devices for storing authentication certificates for seamless future validation.

Main Results:

• The LKA scheme demonstrated reduced operation time and costs for key generation compared to existing methods.
• Lower communication costs were incurred during the execution of the LKA device authentication protocol.
• The LKA scheme exhibited reduced latency compared to three other existing schemes.

Conclusions:

• The proposed LKA scheme effectively enhances the security of wearable devices in remote patient monitoring.
• The scheme offers significant improvements in efficiency, reducing key generation time, communication costs, and latency.
• This contributes to more reliable and secure electronic healthcare services, mitigating risks associated with cyberattacks on IoT medical devices.