Enhanced DTLS with CoAP-based authentication scheme for the internet of things in healthcare application

Abstract

As health data are very sensitive, there is a need to prevent and control the health data with end-to-end security solutions. In general, a number of authentication and authorization schemes are available to prevent and protect the sensitive data, which are collected with the help of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The transport layer security (TLS) protocol is designed to transfer the data from source to destination in more reliable manner. This protocol enables a user to overcome the no lost or reordered messages. The more challenge with TLS is to tolerate unreliability. In order to overcome this issue, Datagram transport layer security (DTLS) protocol has been designed and used in low-power wireless constrained networks. The DTLS protocol consists of a base protocol, record layer, handshake protocol, ChangeCipherSpec and alert protocol. The complex issue with the DTLS protocol is the possibility of an attacker could send a number of ClientHello messages to a server. This scenario would cause a denial-of-service (DOS) attack against the server. This DoS attack enables new connection between the attacker and server, increasing attacker bandwidth, and allocation of resources for every ClientHello message. In order to overcome this issue, we have proposed a smart gateway-based authentication and authorization method to prevent and protect more sensitive physiological data from an attacker and malicious users. The enhanced smart gateway-based DTLS is demonstrated with the help of Contiki Network Simulator. The packet loss ratio is calculated for the CoAP, host identity protocol, CoAP-DTLS and CoAP-enhanced DTLS to evaluate the performance of the proposed work. Data transmission and handshake time are also calculated to evaluate the efficiency of the enhanced DTLS.