Towards enhancing security of IoT-Enabled healthcare system

Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based healthcare systems are comprised of a large number of networked medical devices, wearables, and sensors that collect and transmit data to improve patient care. However, the enormous number of networked devices renders these systems vulnerable to assaults. To address these challenges, researchers advocated reducing execution time, leveraging cryptographic protocols to improve security and avoid assaults, and utilizing energy-efficient algorithms to minimize energy consumption during computation. Nonetheless, these systems still struggle with long execution times, assaults, excessive energy usage, and inadequate security. We present a novel whale-based attribute encryption scheme (WbAES) that empowers the transmitter and receiver to encrypt and decrypt data using asymmetric master key encryption. The proposed WbAES employs attribute-based encryption (ABE) using whale optimization algorithm behaviour, which transforms plain data to ciphertexts and adjusts the whale fitness to generate a suitable master public and secret key, ensuring security against unauthorized access and manipulation. The proposed WbAES is evaluated using patient health record (PHR) datasets collected by IoT-based sensors, and various attack scenarios are established using Python libraries to validate the suggested framework. The simulation outcomes of the proposed system are compared to cutting-edge security algorithms and achieved finest performance in terms of reduced 11 s of execution time for 20 sensors, 0.121 mJ of energy consumption, 850 Kbps of throughput, 99.85 % of accuracy, and 0.19 ms of computational cost.