ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people’s lives in all aspects. This pandemic has raised the usage of ubiquitous networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) for information exchange in various domains. MANET is a group of versatile nodes that communicates with each other without relying on a fixed physical framework. One of the prominent features of MANET is its versatile topology. Because of this striking feature, MANETs are employed in various domains like defense and combat operations, disaster management, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. In this paper, we enlighten the significance of MANET in the smart healthcare system. The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak demanded the reshaping of the healthcare systems to combat the pandemic and similar cataclysms. Existing healthcare systems are proved inefficient in dealing with pandemic situations, because they are not fully automated and also vulnerable to various security attacks. Therefore, it is vital to empower the healthcare sectors by integrating ubiquitous networks and other emerging technologies. In this paper, we proposed a MANET-based secure healthcare system to exchange medical data among portable nodes. Ensuring secure communication in the MANET-based healthcare system is one of the challenging issues. Healthcare system demands the sharing of confidential medical data among mobile nodes. So it is essential to provide secure information exchange in healthcare system by using strong cryptographic schemes. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid cryptographic algorithm for secure medical information exchange among mobile healthcare nodes. The proposed cryptographic scheme uses logistic map for key generation. Logistic map exhibits high security with less computational power. Our simulation results show that the proposed hybrid cryptographic scheme exhibits better security against various attacks in MANET-based healthcare systems.
ABSTRACT
With the development of telecommunication systems and customized monitoring devices, telehealth has been widely used to improve medical quality and reduce overall health costs. However, the convenience of connection between the providers and patients through a public channel also leads to significant security and privacy concerns. Though there have been many authentication schemes designed for secure communications in telecare systems, most of them suffer from malicious attacks or have heavy computation and communication costs. Thus, in this article, we proposed a blockchain-based user authentication scheme integrating with access control and physical unclonable function (PUF). Permissioned blockchain and PUF are used to support secure data sharing across the healthcare service providers and identify the devices, respectively. Security analysis shows that our protocol satisfies the security requirements for telehealth services and is provably secure in the random oracle model. The performance evaluation demonstrates that it has less computation and communication costs compared with three of the latest schemes.
ABSTRACT
The rapid proliferation of embedded devices has led to the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) with applications in numerous domains such as home automation, healthcare, education and agriculture. However, many of the connected devices particularly in smart homes are the target of attacks that try to exploit security vulnerabilities such as hard-coded passwords and insecure data transfer. Recent studies show that there is a considerable surge in the number of phishing attacks targeting smart homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, many of the existing user authentication protocols in the literature incur additional computational overhead and need to be made more resilient to smart home targeted attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight and privacy-preserving remote user authentication protocol for securing smart home applications. Our approach is based on Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) to make our protocol resilient to smart home attacks such as smartphone capture attacks and phishing attacks. In addition, the lightweight nature of our solution is suitable for deployment on heterogeneous and resource constrained IoT devices. Besides, we leverage geometric secret sharing for establishing mutual authentication among the participating entities. We validate the security of the proposed protocol using the AVISPA formal verification tool and prototype it on a Raspberry Pi to analyze the power consumption. Finally, a comparison with existing schemes reveals that our scheme incurs a 20% reduction in communication overhead on smart devices. Furthermore, our proposed scheme is usable as it absolves users from memorizing passwords and carrying smart cards. Author