End-to-end privacy preserving scheme for IoT-based healthcare systems

Preserving patients’ privacy is one of the most important challenges in IoT-based healthcare systems. Although patient privacy has been widely addressed in previous work, there is a lack of a comprehensive end-to-end approach that simultaneously preserves the location and data privacy of patients assuming that system entities are untrusted. Most of the past researches assume that parts of this end-to-end system are trustworthy while privacy may be threatened by insider attacks. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end privacy preserving scheme for the patients assuming that all main entities of the healthcare system (including sensors, gateways, and application providers) are untrusted. The proposed scheme preserves end-to-end privacy against insider threats as well as external attacks concerning the resource restrictions of the sensors. This scheme provides mutual authentication between main entities while preserves patients’ anonymity. Only the allowed users can access the real identity of patients alongside their locations and their healthcare information. Informal security analysis and formal security verification of the proposed protocol in AVISPA show that it is secure against impersonation, replay, modification, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Moreover, performance assessments show that the proposed protocol provides more security services without considerable growth in the computation overhead of the sensors. Also, it is shown that the proposed protocol diminishes the signaling overhead of the sensors and so their energy consumption compared to the literature at the expense of adding a little more signaling overhead to the gateways.