Session Resumption-Based End-to-End Security for Healthcare Internet-of-Things

In this paper, a session resumption-based end-to end security scheme for healthcare Internet of things (IoT) is proposed. The proposed scheme is realized by employing certificate based DTLS handshake between end-users and smart gateways as well as utilizing DTLS session resumption technique. Smart gateways enable the sensors to no longer need to authenticate and authorize remote end-users by handing over the necessary security context. Session resumption technique enables end-users and medical sensors to directly communicate without the need for establishing the communication from the initial handshake. Session resumption technique has an abbreviated form of DTLS handshake and neither requires certificate-related nor public-key funtionalities. This alleviates some burden of medical sensors to no longer need to perform expensive operations. The energy performance evaluations of the proposed scheme are evaluated by developing a remote patient monitoring prototype based on healthcare IoT. The energy-performance evaluation results show that our scheme is about 97% and 10% faster than certificate based and symmetric key-based DTLS, respectively. Also, the certificate-based DTLS consumes about 2.2X more RAM and 2.9X more ROM resources required by our scheme. While, our scheme and symmetric key-based DTLS have almost similar RAM and ROM requirements. The security analysis reveals that the proposed scheme fulfills the requirements of end-to-end security and provides higher security level than related approaches found in the literature. Thus, the presented scheme is a well suited solution to provide end-to-end security for healthcare IoT.