Lightweight secure MQTT for mobility enabled E-health internet of things

Abstract EN

Internet of Things (IoT) is a smart interconnection of miniature sensors, enabling association of large number of smart objects ranging from assisted living and e-health to smart cities.

IoT devices are equipped with limited resources in terms of power, memory and processing capabilities, therefore, presenting novel challenges to security.

The purpose of this paper is to design energy efficient security mechanism for IoT based e-health system in which medical data is encrypted using lightweight cryptographic operations.

The proposed scheme provides end-to-end data confidentiality for mobility enabled e-health IoT system.

Our security scheme is simple and can be computed quickly on scarce resourced motes while providing required security services.

Further, the mobility of patients is managed securely without the need of frequent reconfigurations during their movement within hospital/home premises.

The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme reduces energy utilization to 17.84% and increases longevity of motes by 5.6 times compared to Certificate-Based Datagram Transport Layer Security (CB-DTLS).

Energy consumption in configuration handover during mobility is handled by resource-rich devices, which make this scheme efficient in managing mobility of sensors.

This work can be used as a basis for future research on securing patient data in an e-health system using energy efficient cryptographic operations.