Bruno M. G. Rosa, Salzitsa Anastasova, Guang‐Zhong Yang
Implantable devices represent the future of remote medical monitoring and administration of both chemical and physical therapies to the patients. Although some of these devices are already in the market, the security mechanisms deployed inside them to withstand deliberate external influence are still decades away from the robust digital data security schemes employed in modern distributed networks these days. Medical data theft, spoofing, and disclosure pose serious threats that can ultimately lead to individual and social stigmas or even death. In this article, we present a small-form and batteryless implantable device with acquisition channels for biopotential (30-dB gain and 16-Hz bandwidth), arterial pulse oximetry, and temperature (0.12°C accuracy) recordings, suitable for cardiovascular, neuronal, and endocrine parameters assessment. The proposed device is powered by the near-field communication (NFC) interface with an external mobile phone, with a power consumption of 0.9 mW and achieving the full operation for distances close to 1 cm under the skin. In situ encryption of the acquired physiological signals is performed by a lightweight and short-term symmetric-key distribution scheme with data stream hopping, in order to ensure secure data transference over the air between the patient and trusted entities only, complemented by data storage, processing, and recovery through a medical blockchain type of network that involves the main stakeholders inside a medical community.
With the limited service available to traditional people, millions of the people have been impacted by growing population of older people and patients with chronic conditions. EHealthcare networks starting to deliver medical services using rapid increases in the number of biomedical sensors, the Internet of Things and advanced communication and network technologies, particularly for remote physical supervision, with the goal of increasing the quality and effectiveness of conventional medical system. The aim is to deliver a healthy and powerful approach to health care using wireless internet network as a transmission and storage mechanism for connecting the patient's devices and the technology in the blockchain. Customers today have various problems with the Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs). Cost performance, low energy consumption, efficient communication of data between nodes and protection are major challenges in WSN. Blockchain is able to solve a variety of WSN problems, including secure data transfers and confidence, etc. In this paper we have done the survey of use of blockchain technology in wireless body area network.
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) refer to small sensor network that consists of sensor devices mounted on the surface of the body or implanted in the body, as such networks are employed to harvest physiological data of the human body or to act as an assistant regulator of several specific physiological indicators of the human body. The sensor devices transmit the harvested human physiological data to the local node via a public channel. Before transmitting data, the sensor device and the local node should perform mutual authentication and key agreement. It is proposed in this paper a secure mutual authentication scheme of blockchain-based in WBANs. To analyze the security of this scheme, formal security analysis, and informal security analysis are used, then the computation and communication costs are compared with those of the relevant schemes. Relevant experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme exhibit more effective control over energy consumption and promising.
Time synchronization among IoT devices is a fundamental requirement for efficient and reliable communication on a global scale. Common synchronization schemes such as NTP operate on a trust-based client-server model, which does not scale well in a decentralized network because single server failures can lead to a severe downtime before re-establishing synchronization. Public blockchains such as Ethereum provide a trustless network and tamper-proof time-stamped data that is freely available. In this paper, we leverage the availability of time information in the block headers, which are very small (several hundreds of bytes) compared to the full blocks and can be validated without participation in the mining process. Our approach uses two estimators that are fed with the timestamps from block headers as well as the elapsed time between consecutive block receptions to estimate the true time to an accuracy of one second. We evaluate our approach by extensive validation on blockchain data from different geographical locations across the globe and show that global synchronization can be established despite the non-deterministic behavior of blockchains such as mining difficulty, network latencies and forks.
The emergence of biomedical sensor devices, wireless communication, and innovation in other technologies for healthcare applications result in the evolution of a new area of research that is termed as Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBAN originates from Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which are used for implementing many healthcare systems integrated with networks and wireless devices to ensure remote healthcare monitoring. WBAN is a network of wearable devices implanted in or on the human body. The main aim of WBAN is to collect the human vital signs/physiological data (like ECG, body temperature, EMG, glucose level, etc.) round-the-clock from patients that demand secure, optimal and efficient routing techniques. The efficient, secure, and reliable designing of routing protocol is a difficult task in WBAN due to its diverse characteristic and restraints, such as energy consumption and temperature-rise of implanted sensors. The two significant constraints, overheating of nodes and energy efficiency must be taken into account while designing a reliable blockchain-enabled WBAN routing protocol. The purpose of this study is to achieve stability and efficiency in the routing of WBAN through managing temperature and energy limitations. Moreover, the blockchain provides security, transparency, and lightweight solution for the interoperability of physiological data with other medical personnel in the healthcare ecosystem. In this research work, the blockchain-based Adaptive Thermal-/Energy-Aware Routing (ATEAR) protocol for WBAN is proposed. Temperature rise, energy consumption, and throughput are the evaluation metrics considered to analyze the performance of ATEAR for data transmission. In contrast, transaction throughput, latency, and resource utilization are used to investigate the outcome of the blockchain system. Hyperledger Caliper, a benchmarking tool, is used to evaluate the performance of the blockchain system in terms of CPU utilization, memory, and memory utilization. The results show that by preserving residual energy and avoiding overheated nodes as forwarders, high throughput is achieved with the ultimate increase of the network lifetime. Castalia, a simulation tool, is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol, and its comparison is made with Multipath Ring Routing Protocol (MRRP), thermal-aware routing algorithm (TARA), and Shortest-Hop (SHR). Evaluation results illustrate that the proposed protocol performs significantly better in balancing of temperature (to avoid damaging heat effect on the body tissues) and energy consumption (to prevent the replacement of battery and to increase the embedded sensor node life) with efficient data transmission achieving a high throughput value.
More and more Internet of Things (IoT) devices are deployed around the world, due to the convenience and extra functionality they enable. This growth, while great for the industry as a whole, has come at a price with respect to ensuring and maintaining security and privacy. Having that in mind, one of the most common solutions to the IoT security problem is to update the devices frequently. Recently, LoRa Alliance has released a new specification (FUOTA) on how to perform firmware updates using LoRa technology. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework to securely update the firmware of the IoT devices using the LoRa communication protocol. As a first step, we perform an evaluation of the firmware update procedure using different network sizes and different firmware sizes. The evaluation shows that there is a need to use more gateways that will collaborate to increase the reliability and the performance of the firmware update process.
Abstract Objective: In order to cope with a sudden outbreak of new coronavirus infection, a large number of potential infected persons need to be isolated. A new smart monitoring system which integrates Internet of things and blockchain technology to monitor isolated people in real time was design and studied.Methods: A internet of things devices will collects the location and physical data of isolated people, the data will be sent to master devices which will integrate and format those data and transfer to a smart contract. A smart contract compares and analyses the data with the threshold which is predefined. When the data exceed the threshold, the smart contract will alert the master device, which will notify the isolated person and center for disease control and prevention, the event will be stored in the consortium blockchain. The blockchain does not store the isolated people's details, which are stored in electronic health records linked to the blockchain to guarantee the data safety.Results: This system realizes the effective real-time monitoring of isolators including their physical condition and geographical position on the premise of protecting their privacy and security.Conclusion: By the system, the center for disease control and prevention can respond quickly according to their alerts. It has the advantages of good integrity, tamper-proof, and transparency to isolators.
Wireless body area network includes some tiny wearable sensors for monitoring the physiological data of user, which has been a promising method of promoting the quality and efficiency greatly in healthcare. The collected physical signs are aggregated into the medical documents and uploaded to cloud server for utilizing by the remote user. As these files are highly sensitive privacy data, there is a vital challenge that constructs a secure and efficient communication architecture in this application scenario. Based on this standpoint, we present a lightweight verifiability ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption protocol with outsourced decryption in this article. Specifically, our construction enjoys the following six features: (1) Although the outsourced decryption enables to save the computation overhead of the data user sharply in an attribute-based encryption scheme, the ciphertext is out of control and the correctness cannot be guaranteed by the data owner. The proposal provides the verifiability of ciphertext that ensures the user to check the correctness efficiently. (2) The size of the ciphertext is constant that is not increased with the complexity of attribute and access structure. (3) For Internet of Things devices, it introduces the fog computing into our protocol for the purpose of low latency and relation interactions, which has virtually saved the bandwidth. (4) With the help of blockchain technique, we encapsulate the hash value of public parameter, original and transformed ciphertext and transformed key into a block, so that the tamper-resistance is facilitated against an adversary from inside and outside the system. (5) In the standard model, we prove that it is selectively chosen-plaintext attack-secure and verifiable provided that the computational bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption holds. (6) It implements this protocol and shows the result of performance measurement, which indicates a significant reduction on communication and computation costs burden on every entity in wireless body area network.
With the development of sensor devices, wireless sensor networks have been widely used, and Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are relatively common application scenarios in wireless sensor networks. The wearable device is used to collect physiological data of the human body, and the server device is adopted to store physiological data of the human body. The openness of the network environment and network devices’ dynamic nature make WBANs vulnerable to security threats from attackers. The centralized two-hop architecture contains only one hub node, and the data stored in the hub node may be tampered with by attackers. Once attackers occupy the node, the entire network will be paralyzed. To tackle such an issue, it is proposed in this article a model in WBANs architecture based on Blockchain technology, where the authentication protocol and blind signature protocol between nodes are designed in the new WBANs model, making the Blockchain data transmission system in a wireless network environment secure and reliable. Experimental results show that the proposed method is promising and shows higher levels of safety and stability than other methods.
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a kind of connected infrastructure of smart medical devices along with software applications, health systems and services. These medical devices and applications are connected to healthcare systems through the Internet. The Wi-Fi enabled devices facilitate machine-to-machine communication and link to the cloud platforms for data storage. IoMT has the ability to make accurate diagnoses, with fewer mistakes and lower costs of care. IoMT with smartphone applications permits the patients to exchange their health related confidential and private information to the healthcare experts (i.e., doctors) for the better control of diseases, and also for tracking and preventing chronic illnesses. Due to insecure communication among the entities involved in IoMT, an attacker can tamper with the confidential and private health related information for example an attacker can not only intercept the messages, but can also modify, delete or insert malicious messages during communication. To deal this sensitive issue, we design a novel blockchain enabled authentication key agreement protocol for IoMT environment, called BAKMP-IoMT. BAKMP-IoMT provides secure key management between implantable medical devices and personal servers and between personal servers and cloud servers. The legitimate users can also access the healthcare data from the cloud servers in a secure way. The entire healthcare data is stored in a blockchain maintained by the cloud servers. A detailed formal security including the security verification of BAKMP-IoMT using the widely-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool is performed to demonstrate its resilience against the different types of possible attack. The comparison of BAKMP-IoMT with relevant existing schemes is conducted which identifies that the proposed system furnishes better security and functionality, and also needs low communication and computational costs as compared to other schemes. Finally, the simulation of BAKMP-IoMT is conducted to demonstrate its impact on the performance parameters.
Iván Froiz-Míguez, Paula Fraga‐Lamas, José Varela-Barbeito, Tiago M. Fernández‐Caramés
The latest advances in the different Industry 4.0 technologies have enabled the automation and optimization of complex tasks of production processes thanks to their ability to monitor and track the state of physical elements like machinery, environmental sensors/actuators or industrial operators. This paper focuses on the latter and presents the design and evaluation of a system for monitoring industrial workers that provides a near real-time decentralized response system aimed at reacting and tracing events that affect operator personal safety and health. Such a monitoring system is based on the information collected from sensors encapsulated in IoT wearables that are used to measure both personal and environmental data. The communications architecture relies on LoRaWAN, an LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Network) technology that offers good reliability in harsh communications environments and that provides relatively long distance communications with low-energy consumption. Specifically, each wearable sends the collected information (e.g., heart rate, altitude, external temperature, gas concentration, location) from the sensors to the nearest LoRaWAN gateway, which is transmitted to a pool of nodes where information is stored in a distributed manner. Such a decentralized system allows for providing information redundancy and guarantees its availability as long as there is an operative node. In addition, the proposed system is able to store and to process the collected data through smart contracts in a blockchain, which eliminate the need for a central backend and ensure the traceability and immutability of such data in order to share them with third parties (e.g., insurance companies or medical services).
Md. Ashraf Uddin, Andrew Stranieri, Iqbal Gondal, Venki Balasubramanian
Blockchain technologies emerging for healthcare support secure health data sharing with greater interoperability among different heterogeneous systems. However, the collection and storage of data generated from Body Area Sensor Net-works(BASN) for migration to high processing power computing services requires an efficient BASN architecture. We present a decentralized BASN architecture that involves devices at three levels; 1) Body Area Sensor Network-medical sensors typically on or in patient's body transmitting data to a Smartphone, 2) Fog/Edge, and 3) Cloud. We propose that a Patient Agent(PA) replicated on the Smartphone, Fog and Cloud servers processes medical data and execute a task offloading algorithm by leveraging a Blockchain. Performance analysis is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Blockchain leveraged, distributed Patient Agent controlled BASN.
In today modern digital world, there is huge need of security in medical field also. Among all modern data transfer techniques, Blockchain is a fast growing technology which provide a cryptodata through which we can transfer data between peer-to -peer node. Blockchain provide security which depends on highly cryptographic schemes. We can integrate blockchain with wireless body area network. Because WBAN is also a very emerging field of medical department. All the data of patient is maintained in a electronic health record (EHR). So Maintaining a EHR is very challenging face of medical field. In WBAN we transfer the patients data among different entities like healthcare server, medical staff, health insurer over the network. So we can provide security in this field through blockchain. In this paper we propose an architectural model of block chain with WBAN. We also mention some challenges which are faced in the field of medical health care applications.
A network of embedded sensors on the human body called Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has recently emerged as a healthcare monitoring framework, to provide better medical services. The data collected by these sensors is transmitted via a wireless medium and contains sensitive information of the patients. Therefore, how to provide security schemes for WBAN with resource constraints devices remains a big challenge. Recently, BAN-GZKP, an authentication scheme based on Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) was designed for WBAN as an optimal solution to several attacks suffered by another ZKP based protocol called BANZKP. However, BAN-GZKP is found to be vulnerable to Node Compromise Attack, Node Impersonation, and Denial-of-Service Attacks. To fix the vulnerabilities of BANGZKP, this paper proposes an enhanced BAN-GZKP which exploits a unique physical layer characteristic coming from the surrounding WBAN, i.e., the distinct received signal strength variation among on-body channels and between on-body and off-body channels, to ensure robust authentication. To prove the reliability of our proposal, we conducted real-world experiments on 3 subjects in indoor and outdoor areas. The results showed that our scheme improves the security of the previous scheme with even lesser cost.
Xiaojun Zhang, Jie Zhao, Chunxiang Xu, Hongwei Li · 6 authors
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) rely on powerful cloud storage services to manage massive medical data. As precise medical diagnosis analysis is heavily based on these medical data, any altered medical data may cause severe consequences, the integrity of outsourced medical data has become the most concerning security issue. Up to date, most existing public auditing mechanisms have been proposed to check the data integrity, but they could not achieve conditional identity privacy, any patient would not like others to know his/her real identity corresponding to certain serious disease, and some malicious patients should be revoked timely due to misbehaviors. Additionally, they are vulnerable to malicious auditors, by colluding with the cloud server to cheat patients. In this paper, we propose a conditional identity privacy-preserving public auditing (CIPPPA) mechanism for cloud-based WBANs. CIPPPA is the first public auditing mechanism achieving conditional identity privacy of patients in WBANs, the real identity of a patient is unknown to anyone in cloud-based WBANs other than the private key generator (PKG). We attempt to integrate Ethereum blockchain into CIPPPA, which gives assistance to patients for validating malicious auditing behaviors. Formal security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that CIPPPA is practical for cloud-based WBANs.
Yongjun Ren, Yan Leng, Fujian Zhu, Jin Wang · 5 authors
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are expected to play a vital role in the field of patient-health monitoring shortly. They provide a convenient way to collect patient data, but they also bring serious problems which are mainly reflected in the safe storage of the collected data. The privacy and security of data storage in WBAN devices cannot meet the needs of WBAN users. Therefore, this paper adopts blockchain technology to store data, which improves the security of the collected data. Moreover, a storage model based on blockchain in WBAN is proposed in our solution. However, blockchain storage brings new problems, for example, that the storage space of blockchain is small, and the stored content is open to unauthorized attackers. To solve the problems above, this paper proposed a sequential aggregate signature scheme with a designated verifier (DVSSA) to ensure that the user's data can only be viewed by the designated person and to protect the privacy of the users of WBAN. In addition, the new signature scheme can also compress the size of the blockchain storage space.
Diabetes Mellitus, usually called only Diabetes, is a worldwide chronic metabolic disorder that is characterized by abnormal oscillations in blood sugar levels. Such levels should be monitored by diabetes patients, which traditionally have had to take blood samples by finger-pricking, at least between twice and four times a day. Finger-pricking has a number of drawbacks that can be tackled by Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs), which are able to determine blood sugar levels throughout the day and not only at specific time instants. In this paper, the design of an IoT CGM-based system is proposed, whose collected blood sugar sample values can be accessed remotely; thus being able to monitor patients, specifically dependent ones (e.g., children, elders, and pregnant women) and warn them in the case where a dangerous situation is detected. In order to create such a system, a fog computing system, based on distributed mobile smart phones, has been devised to collect data from the CGMs. Moreover, the use of a blockchain is proposed, to receive, validate, and store the collected data with the objective of avoiding untrusted sources and, thus, to provide a transparent and trustworthy data source of a population, which can vary in age, ethnicity, psychology, education, self-care, and/or geographic location, in a rapid, flexible, scalable, and low-cost way. These crowdsourced data can enable novel mHealth applications for diagnosis, patient monitoring, or even public health actions, which can help to advance in the control of the disease and raise global awareness on the increasing prevalence of diabetes.
Kai Fan, Shangyang Wang, Yanhui Ren, Kan Yang · 7 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) has been developed rapidly to make our life easier. In many IoT applications (e.g., smart homes, healthcare, etc.), all the IoT devices should be synchronized in time. However, some malicious nodes located in the IoT network can influence the time synchronization, which may interrupt the IoT system and lead to serious accidents. Therefore, it is critical and challenging to guarantee the accuracy and consistency of time during the time synchronization among all the IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based scheme to assure the security during time synchronization in IoT. Specifically, a publicly verifiable ledger is utilized to record and broadcast time, which can minimize many attacks from external environments. The use of multiple time sources can avoid the vulnerabilities caused by the centralized generation of accurate time. Moreover, the decentralized structure of this scheme has the advantage of adapting the changes of network topology. By employing an improved practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus mechanism, time synchronization can be implemented efficiently. At last, the analysis results show that our proposed scheme can achieve the desired security with high efficiency.
Low power communication is a major milestone for the Internet of Things (IoT). Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies seek to provide a large coverage area and long battery life at the cost of a reduced bandwidth compared to traditional networks. Commercially-available LPWAN solutions typically involve the usage of a wireless infrastructure from a network provider; with the notable exception of crowd-sourced networks, which use gateways from other users for wireless communication to end-devices. In this paper, we analyse the feasability of a fully decentralized LPWAN infrastructure and build a working prototype based on the LoRaWAN protocol.
In this paper, we propose BAN-GZKP that optimizes the best to date secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme, BANZKP, designed for WBAN networks. BANZKP is vulnerable to several security attacks such as the replay attack, DDoS attacks at sink and redundancy information crack. Also BANZKP needs an end-to-end authentication which is not compliant with the human body postural mobility. Our scheme, BAN-GZKP, improves both the security and postural mobility resilience of BANZKP. In order to fix the security vulnerabilities of BANZKP, BAN-GZKP uses a novel random key allocation. Moreover, BAN-GZKP uses a hop-by-hop authentication scheme which makes it tolerant to postural mobility. We further prove the reliability of our scheme to various attacks including those to which BANZKP is vulnerable. Furthermore, via extensive simulations we prove that our scheme, BAN-GZKP, outperforms BANZKP in terms of reliability to human body postural mobility for various network parameters (end-to-end delay, number of packets exchanged in the network, number of transmissions). We compared both schemes using representative convergecast strategies with various transmission rates and human postural mobility. When our BAN-GZKP scheme is used the percentage of packets received increases by 34.06%, the end-to-end-delay reduces by 36.02% and the number of transmissions reduces by 8.75% with respect to the case when BANZKP is used. Moreover, BAN-GZKP uses only a three-phase authentication which is optimal in the class of ZKP protocols. Finally, it is important to mention that BAN-GZKP has no additional cost in terms memory, computational complexity or energy consumption compared to BANZKP.