Secure handshake with symptoms-matching

Abstract

In our aging society, mHealthcare social network (MHSN) built upon wireless body sensor network (WBSN) and mobile communications provides a promising platform for the seniors who have the same symptom to exchange their experiences, give mutual support and inspiration to each other, and help forwarding their health information wirelessly to a related eHealth center. However, there exist many challenging security issues in MHSN such as how to securely identify a senior who has the same symptom, how to prevent others who don't have the symptom from knowing someone's symptom? In this paper, to tackle these challenging security issues, we propose a secure same-symptom-based handshake (SSH) scheme, and apply the provable security technique to demonstrate its security in the random oracle model. In addition, we discuss a promising application -- social-based patient health information (PHI) collaborative reporting in MHSN, and conduct extensive simulations to evaluate its efficiency in terms of PHI reporting delay.