Verifiable Security and Privacy Provisioning Protocol for High Reliability in Smart Healthcare Communication Environment

Abstract

Critical patient data collected by body sensor units and transmitted over public wireless communication channels is exposed to numerous privacy and security attacks. As such, there is need for deployment of robust security solutions to uphold integrity, confidentiality and availability. In addition, the resource constrained nature of sensor nodes require efficient authentication protocols in terms of computation power, energy, bandwidth and storage requirements. To this end, many protocols based on public key infrastructure, blockchain and bilinear pairings are unsuitable for deployment in these sensor networks. Apart from efficiency shortfalls, most of the conventional security protocols cannot withstand majority of the typical wireless body area networks attacks. To this effect, a verifiable security and privacy provisioning protocol based on elliptic curve is presented in this paper. The reliability of the proposed is demonstrated via its robustness under Dolev–Yao (D-Y) and Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) threat models. On the other hand, its lightweight and efficient nature is investigated using execution time and bandwidth requirements, which are shown to be the least when compared with other schemes.