Internet of Healthcare privacy protocols

How can we keep electronic healthcare information secure in the world of the Internet of Things where diagnostic, devices, monitors, and other equipment are all connected? A team from India, writing in the International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering offers one possible solution.

Aakanksha Tewari and B.B. Gupta of the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra, explain how they have developed a secure and low-cost environment for the IoT devices in healthcare. Their aim is to make the lives of patients easier and more comfortable by providing them with more effective treatments but at the same time not compromise their privacy.

They describe their solution as utilizing a very simple mutual authentication protocol. This, they say provides strong location privacy by using one way hashing, pseudo-random number generators, and bitwise operations. They add that strong location privacy is critical to ensuring healthcare security and they can enforce this property by ensuring that tags in the network are indistinguishable and the connection protocols ensure forward secrecy. The team has now verified through a formal proof model just how secure is their approach to location privacy. The team adds that the system is suitable for any kind of IoT healthcare device however large or small. Moreover, the protocol is suitable for both passive and active tags.

Tewari, A. and Gupta, B.B. (2020) ‘An internet-of-things-based security scheme for healthcare environment for robust location privacy’, Int. J. Computational Science and Engineering, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp.298–303.