Towards utilizing Tcpcrypt in mobile healthcare applications

Abstract

The evolution and growth of networks has made the personal data of the users available to many applications. In this direction, one of the main concerns is to protect the sensitive personal information, while at the same time avoid delays in the provision of services like healthcare to the general public. An extension of TCP, the Tcpcrypt, is a promising technology that can be used on this field. Tcpcrypt is designed to provide end-to-end encryption in the transport layer with low overhead, rendering it a very promising solution in order to protect medical data that are often handled by devices with limited resources. In this paper Tcpcrypt performance is evaluated against TCP, in terms of additional overhead incurred in the total size of the transmitted data and the total number of CPU instructions that are executed. Moreover, a solution for reducing overhead through fine-grained packet handling is proposed. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.