ECASS: an encryption compression aggregation security scheme for secure data transmission in ambient assisted living systems

Considerable efforts are being spent worldwide to ensure comfortable living environments and decent, on-time assistance to elderly and people requiring healthcare services. Recent advances in data acquisition and communication are allowing revolutionary ambient assisted leaving (AAL) systems to be implemented, where healthcare data are collected and reported on-the-fly to dedicated medical servers for further analysis and actions. Due to the increasing rely on distributed, resource constrained sensing devices, AAL systems are being subject to large number of attacks. In addition to usual high energy consumption and communication overhead, current systems are not yet able to fully safeguard the private data of their users. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose in this paper to combine the use of cryptography, compressed sensing, and steganography into a new generic solution called Encryption Compression Aggregation Security Scheme (ECASS). While focusing on the specific case of Medical Healthcare Systems, ECASS aims to secure private data exchanges over wireless networks while achieving lower energy consumption and communication overhead. Our simulations with the NS-2.35 simulator are showing an improvement of 40 and 50% in terms of energy consumption and communication overhead respectively compared to the IBE-Lite security scheme.