Robust secure communication protocol for smart healthcare system with FPGA implementation

Abstract

Abstract Vast development of wireless technology and cloud computing has given lots of benefit to the society in a variety of ways. One such application using this technology is telemedicine or mobile healthcare and in this, security is one of the most important concern. In recent times, multimedia applications include mobile networks, integrated sensors and Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. In the landscape of IoT systems, the problem of privacy, security and trust has remained a challenge since several years. There are only few works proposed to support secure communication in the IoT-enabled Medical Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs). However, the existing protocols have some design flaws and are vulnerable to several security attacks including sensor and user impersonation attacks. In this paper, a novel architecture in the MWSNs is proposed and a suitable authenticated key establishment protocol using the light weight Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for the architecture is designed. The proposed authentication protocol solves the security issues found in existing protocols. The formal method Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic is enforced to prove the correctness of the protocol. Further investigation has led to the claim that the protocol is safe from known security attacks. In addition, the proposed protocol is described in Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL) and its functionalities are checked using Altera Quartus II simulation tool for Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation. The analysis of our protocol and comparison of it with similar protocols show that the proposed protocol is more efficient and robust than the existing protocols.