Privacy-preserving secure and low-cost medical data communication scheme for smart healthcare

Wireless body area network (WBAN) remotely offers various medical services for the benefits of patients, doctors, and society in which medical data is transferred between different entities (i.e., patients, doctors, and hospitals) to analyze such data and provide medical treatments timely to the patients. Since such sensitive data is exchanged in a public network, it is highly required to protect this private and confidential medical data from attackers. Researchers designed various medical data transmission mechanisms but most of them are vulnerable to vital security and privacy threats. Besides, the existing relevant schemes require high computational resources to perform necessary operations on mobile devices (with fixed resources). We, thus, propose a new data communication scheme using low-cost cryptographic functions that can withstand various security and privacy attacks while consuming very less computational resources comparatively. We perform security analysis of the proposed scheme to confirm its robustness and discuss performance analysis based on the test bed setup to verify its computational efficiency.