EPF-FDA: Efficient Pairing Free and Confidentiality Preserving Fog-Based Data Aggregation Scheme for WBANs

In remote health care monitoring systems, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) play an important role. The recent COVID-19 pandemic situation reinforces the importance of such a system. In addition, sensitive Biological Information (BI) of the patient needs to be collected and processed securely in real-time. However, sharing BI through wireless channels creates privacy and security challenges. Many public key cryptography-based schemes are available in the literature to overcome these challenges. However, they are not efficient due to their expensive paring computation. Here we report a pairing-free and confidentiality-preserving fog-based data aggregation scheme to support delay-sensitive monitoring applications. Further, patients' BI can be analyzed at the Fog Nodes (FNs) securely to facilitate decision making. The comparisons of security and performance shows that the suggested scheme outperforms conventional methods by consuming less computational and communication overhead and provides essential security attributes.