A Secure and Robust Architecture based on Mobile Health Apps in Patient Monitoring Environments (Preprint)
Authors: Ahamad Shaik Shakeel , ALOWAIDI MAJED 
Published: July 2020

BACKGROUND

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic realized the importance of patient monitoring environments, Mobile Healthcare Applications (MHA) plays very crucial role in the successful implementation of patient monitoring environments. Existing MHA’s in the realm of patient monitoring environments does not ensure end to end security, application security and communication security

OBJECTIVE

This research work is aimed to (1) identifies the relevant security concerns in the existing real time Mobile Healthcare Application solutions and existing research works in mobile healthcare, (2) We have proposed a secure architecture from the UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card) of the patient’s smart phone and hospital server and a secure protocol is proposed in the realm of Patient Management and Monitoring, (3) Compared our proposed healthcare system with the existing real time Mobile Healthcare Application solutions and existing research works in mobile healthcare and found to be better than these solutions and (4) We successfully implemented our proposed protocol using Kotlin language in Android Studio and found to be better than the existing solutions.

METHODS

Security characteristics relevant to the Mobile Healthcare Applications (MHA) were assessed, presented, and discussed. These characteristics were used in the development of a prototypical platform overcoming the limitations in the existing real time Mobile Healthcare Application solutions and existing research works in mobile healthcare. We implemented our proposed protocol using Kotlin language in Android Studio, Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java.

RESULTS

We implemented our proposed protocol using Kotlin language in Android Studio, Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java. ECDH Key exchange algorithm is used for key exchange between MHA in patient’s smart phone and MHA in the hospital TPM. ECDSA digital signature algorithm is used to generate and verify digital signatures, digest algorithm used is SHA-256 and AES symmetric encryption algorithm is used to encrypt the messages between them. We created an EC key pairs (NIST P-256 aka secp256r1) at patient’s MHA and MHA of hospital TPM by using ECDH and we created a shared AES secret key. AES with GCM mode used for encryption and decryption of patient data.

CONCLUSIONS

This paper proposed a secure and robust solution for mobile health applications in patient monitoring environments ensuring end to end security ensuring all the security properties. We implemented our proposed protocol using Kotlin language in Android Studio, Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java. ECDH Key exchange algorithm is used for key exchange between MHA in patient’s smart phone and MHA in the hospital TPM. ECDSA digital signature algorithm is used to generate and verify digital signatures, digest algorithm used is SHA-256 and AES symmetric encryption algorithm is used to encrypt the messages between them. We created an EC key pairs (NIST P-256 aka secp256r1) at patient’s MHA and MHA of hospital TPM by using ECDH and we created a shared AES secret key. AES with GCM mode used for encryption and decryption of patient data.