An anonymity communication protocol for security and privacy of clients in IoT-based mobile health transactions

Abstract

Mobile Health (mHealth) technology facilitates patients’ care and decreases healthcare costs by remotely monitoring healthcare processes and medical data management. Nonetheless, there are many concerns regarding the security, privacy, and anonymity of the mHealth transactions. Conventionally, privacy includes anonymity, untraceability, unlinkability, unforgeability, and confidentiality. Transactions’ confidentiality can be easily protected using confidential transaction techniques. However, anonymity, untraceability, unlinkability, and unforgeability properties are quite challenging issues in healthcare transactions. This paper proposes a UDP-based anonymous protocol for mHealth transactions to protect the security of data and privacy of clients’ identities. In this work, we aim to investigate utilizing one of the best anonymity solutions, onion structure (onion encryption, onion routing, and onion network), with blockchain smart contracts upon the UDP platform to make a protocol for transferring data in IoT-based mHealth applications. In the proposed protocol, every malicious client who sends false data can be easily detected using an identity disclosure process. In this way, mHealth clients, without exchanging sensitive identities, can establish an authorized connection and be protected against different kinds of attacks. According to our experimental results and security/privacy proofs, the proposed protocol has an acceptable computational cost and security protections for IoT-based mHealth transactions.