Lightweight fog‐centric auditing scheme to verify integrity of IoT healthcare data in the cloud environment

Abstract

SummaryIoT healthcare applications have become very popular among medical societies. At regular intervals, the healthcare IoT devices collect the patient's health information and transfer it to cloud storage. Storing the health records in the cloud environment increases the vulnerability. Integrity verification performed at regular intervals ensures the safety and security of the healthcare data stored in the cloud. Existing schemes use RSA and BLS signatures to verify the authenticity. However, the size of the signature is too large in RSA and BLS schemes. Using large signatures for proving the authenticity increases the computation overhead. IoT devices have minimal resource capacity, hence performing heavily weighted integrity schemes will create an unbearable workload. Likewise, private auditing increases the communication overhead between IoT devices and cloud storage. To overcome these issues, a fog‐centric auditing scheme is proposed based on the Cramer–Shoup cryptosystem. The proposed scheme allows the fog nodes to perform integrity verification without compromising security. It reduces the communication overhead by 55%–60%. The size of the CS signature used in the scheme is far lesser than the existing signatures. Moreover, performing the inline deduplication on the fog layer improves the efficiency of cloud storage by 30%.