Light-Weight and Robust Security-Aware D2D-Assist Data Transmission Protocol for Mobile-Health Systems

With the rapid advancement of technology, healthcare systems have been quickly transformed into a pervasive environment, where both challenges and opportunities abound. On the one hand, the proliferation of smart phones and advances in medical sensors and devices have driven the emergence of wireless body area networks for remote patient monitoring, also known as mobile-health (M-health), thereby providing a reliable and cost effective way to improving efficiency and quality of health care. On the other hand, the advances of M-health systems also generate extensive medical data, which could crowd today’s cellular networks. Device-to-device (D2D) communications have been proposed to address this challenge, but unfortunately, security threats are also emerging because of the open nature of D2D communications between medical sensors and highly privacy-sensitive nature of medical data. Even, more disconcerting is healthcare systems that have many characteristics that make them more vulnerable to privacy attacks than in other applications. In this paper, we propose a light-weight and robust security-aware D2D-assist data transmission protocol for M-health systems by using a certificateless generalized signcryption (CLGSC) technique. Specifically, we first propose a new efficient CLGSC scheme, which can adaptively work as one of the three cryptographic primitives: signcryption, signature, or encryption, but within one single algorithm. The scheme is proved to be secure, simultaneously achieving confidentiality and unforgeability. Based on the proposed CLGSC algorithm, we further design a D2D-assist data transmission protocol for M-health systems with security properties, including data confidentiality and integrity, mutual authentication, contextual privacy, anonymity, unlinkability, and forward security. Performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol can achieve the design objectives and outperform existing schemes in terms of computational and communication overhead.