On the Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Security Algorithms for Healthcare

Abstract

With rapid and successful advancement in communication technology and semiconductor devices Internet of Things based smart healthcare is not a concept, but reality. Patients’ vital information sensed by sensing devices is transmitted through heterogeneous communication links to fog/cloud layer for processing, storage, and decision-making or knowledge extraction. Sensitive health data is vulnerable to various security attacks and threats of different levels and impact while getting sensed, are saved or getting transmitted. Off-the-shelf security techniques such as encryption, trust can be applied for privacy and security of data but application-specific demands such as latency/end to end delay in data transmission, additional overhead in terms of computation time, etc., must be taken care of, especially in time-critical healthcare application. This work implements encryption-decryption algorithms and hashing techniques on ECG signals of varying size for secure transmission through communication layer to cloud layer for performance evaluation based on computation time (as in healthcare maximum permissible end to end delay is 250 ms) to ensure Confidentiality, Integrity, and Authentication.