A Secure Framework for Authentication and Encryption Using Improved ECC for IoT-Based Medical Sensor Data

Mobile users are increasing exponentially to adopt ubiquitous services offered by various sectors. This has attracted attention for a secure communication framework to access e-health data on mobile devices. The wearable sensor device is attached to the patient’s body which monitors the blood pressure, body temperature, serum cholesterol, glucose level, etc. In the proposed secure framework, first, the task starts with the patient authentication, after that the sensors device linked to the patient is activated and the sensor values of the patient are transmitted to the cloud server. The patient’s biometrics information has been added as a parameter in addition to the user name and password. The authentication scheme is coined with the SHA-512 algorithm that ensures integrity. To securely send the sensor information, the method follows two kinds of encryption: Substitution-Ceaser cipher and improved Elliptical Curve Cryptography (IECC). Whereas in improved ECC, an additional key (secret key) is generated to enhance the system’s security. In this way, the intricacy of the two phases is augmented. The computational cost of the scheme in the proposed framework is <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4H+Ec+Dc$ </tex-math></inline-formula> which is less than the existing schemes. The average correlation coefficient value is about 0.045 which is close to zero shows the strength of the algorithm. The obtained encryption and decryption time are <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.032~\mu s$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.004~\mu s$ </tex-math></inline-formula> respectively. The overall performance is analyzed by comparing the proposed improved ECC with existing Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA)and ECC algorithms.