Secure Internet of medical Things (IoMT) based on ECMQV-MAC authentication protocol and EKMC-SCP blockchain networking

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a collection of healthcare technologies (medical equipment, software applications, and services) that allows doctors, care providers, and medical test centers to store and exchange health data electronically. However, protecting data privacy via IoMT transmission is a difficult problem. To preserve privacy, blockchain integrated with IoMT enables resilience against a variety of attacks. Blockchain accomplishes peer-to-peer data sharing and stops the majority of the attackers. However, adopting blockchain for Healthcare applications is a prominent challenge due to data privacy issues such as illegal authentication, Byzantine Problems, majority attacks, high computing power, and the enormous storage required to compute healthcare data. Blockchain restrictions in the IoMT sector are solved using the proposed encrypted K-means clustering-based stellar consensus protocol (EKMC-SCP) blockchain networking method. The proposed framework performs mutual user authentication based on the elliptic curve Menezes–Qu–Vanstone-based message authentication code (ECMQV-MAC) protocol under a secure data storage using Deltoid curve-based Pallier cryptosystem (DC-PC) and a key generation mechanism using the Dixon’s method-based Blum–Goldwasser cryptosystem, (DM-BGC). The protocol provides a legal authentication for users to access the blockchain networking (BCN) and avoids large data storage in BC. Furthermore, key generation method makes the privacy of the data more robust against certain internal and external attacks. Finally, a legal user can upload healthcare data in BC, and secure data transfer is performed using EKMC-SCP in the BCN. The experimental results show that the developed framework obtains better throughput and PDR value and reduces the privacy leakages and the time overhead to generating new blocks compared to those of existing state-of-the-art methods.