Security algorithms for distributed storage system for E-health application over wireless body area network

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are an upcoming technology for achieving effective healthcare. The security and privacy of patient-related data are two essential aspects of WBAN system security. Storing data on a single server is simple but may lead to a single point of failure (whether a typical failure or a failure due to security attacks). In this paper, enhanced security and privacy of patient information and E-health systems based on distributed storage systems (DSSs) are developed using public-key cryptography to store patient information. The storage of data and the security requirements (such as confidentiality, reliability, authentication, and dynamic integrity) are simultaneously distributed among individual nodes throughout the network. The patient data are encrypted using the redundant residue number system (RRNS) technique, which depends on a library of moduli in the encrypting process to generate residues. Three algorithms were implemented to decode the RRNS: the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT), Base Extension (BEX) with mixed radix conversion, and the new Chinese Remainder Theorem I (CRT I). The results of a system prototype implementation showed that whenever the value of the moduli was a big prime number, the coding efficiency became large, and the time to send a message decreased by 2 s. The performance of the algorithms was expressed in terms of execution time and cyclomatic complexity (CC). The results showed that the CRT I was 1 s faster than the other decoding algorithms and took around 2.5 s to decode the RRNS. The CRT had a low CC of 15, whereas the MRC and CRT I had a CC of 45 and 40, respectively. The main operation phases of the proposed system are described.