Flexible Security and Privacy, System Architecture for IoT, in Healthcare

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology is continuously being applied in the Healthcare domain because of the new services and capabilities it offers. Nevertheless, this technology has many vulnerabilities and network threats that service providers must first overcome before employing IoT-based smart health applications. Specifically, the data privacy, authentication and confidentiality of the system must be ensured because the IoT devices transmit personal health data and the smart health services are directly connected with the users’ wellbeing. Therefore, a complete and secure healthcare architecture based on IoT technology is needed. In this paper, a flexible security and privacy scheme is proposed. The design is based upon the SM4 block cipher and two innovative modes of operation, namely Counter with Cipher Block Chaining-Message Authentication Code (CCM) and Electronic Codebook (ECB), to enhance the flexibility and scalability of the system. The purpose of the architecture is to provide confidentiality to the IoT-based healthcare system and ensure the privacy and authenticity of the data transmitted. The performance results validate the security and hardware efficiency of the novel architecture compared to other related designs. Specifically, the decrease in hardware resources compared to AES-CCM designs is up to 96.7% with the increase in throughput compared to optimized SM4 systems being 71.3%. Overall, the proposed scheme innovatively implements established security primitives while considering the resource limitations and requirements of smart health services.