A Lightweight & Secure Authentication Scheme for IoT Based E-Health Applications (Preprint)
Authors: ALMULHIM AHMED 
Published: December 2018

BACKGROUND

During last few years, IoT (IoT) is rapidly gaining ground in the field of networking wireless and communications. The basic idea is the connection between heterogeneous objects such as Mobile phones, Sensors, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, etc. Therefore, everything becomes virtual, which means that everything is readable, addressable, and locatable on the Internet. The development of IoT in healthcare field led to several projects, health solutions and publications towards the modernization of healthcare industries worldwide. An E-health system utilizes wireless sensor networking (WSN) technology which consist of wearable and contextual sensors that connect to a Base Station, which in turn communicates with health care facility. There were around three million of patients who are utilizing connected home medical monitoring devices all over the world in 2013. Now, patients can be monitored 24/7 by using sensors in mobile devices such as cell phones or wearable devices. This has led to considerable cost savings through lowered hospital costs, health care provider costs, transportation costs and insurance costs. There is an added advantage of improved quality of care and time saving for patients and hospital staff. However, the increasing use of IoT services has led to increased concerns of security and privacy, especially in healthcare domain. There has been 100 percent increase in cyber security attacks on health care information systems since 2010. The cost of possible attacks on healthcare applications could be as much as 5.6 billion dollars annually. In fact, healthcare applications are prone to data breaches and widening issues in security aspects owing to increasing number of access points to sensitive data through electronic medical records, as well as the rising popularity of wearable technology.

OBJECTIVE

We aim to discern (1) Design light weight authentication scheme using mainly ECC principles for IoT based E-health applications. (2) Develop an authentication scheme with small key size providing comparable level of security. (3) Introduces group-based authentication scheme\model for secure data transmission from IoT nodes to the base station for IoT based E-health application. (4) Provide efficient, lightweight and secure authentication scheme for IoT based E-health applications.

METHODS

Our Research activities are relying on the following steps: begin from in depth literature review, problem formation, designing and simulation setup, testing, verification and publishing.

RESULTS

We intended to propose a lightweight authentication scheme for E-health applications, which authenticates each IoT device and builds secure channels among the sensor nodes and Base Station. So that the scheme will provide authentication of individual nodes and facilitate session key agreement among Base Station and sensor nodes. The proposed scheme will be evaluated against multiple attack scenarios for IoT domain. In order to save energy cost, we plan to apply group- based authentication model which allows all nodes to forward respective data to group head that in turn communicates with the base station. This node may be selected on the basis of the distance to the base station to reduce the communication cost.

CONCLUSIONS

: In this paper, proposing an efficient secured group-based lightweight authentication scheme for IoT based E-health applications. This scheme authenticates and established secure channels through sensor nodes and Base Station for E-health applications. We had analyzed power consumption of E-health applications by comparing our proposed group-based scheme with other existence lightweight authentication schemes for two different cases of patient. 1) With no mobility where patient lying on the bed and 2) with mobility when patient is on the wheel chair to test the power consumptions for each ultra-sensor node. Our scheme had been evaluated on Contiki simulator. The achieved results showed a significant difference of energy consumption and enhances the chances of security while receiving the authentication key. This all achieved by reducing the distance among the nodes and base station and as well as reducing the chances of external attacks by reducing the number of iterations by n for registering the authentication. Group-based node reduces distance and consume less energy and as will as led to reduce communication cost. Also, it will be resistant against several types of attacks by use elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) techniques on group-based node to increase level of security in IoT based E-health applications