LAEBLE: A Lightweight Authentication and Encryption Mechanism for the E-Health System in Bluetooth Low Energy

With the increase in population and the advancement of medical technology, the population is gradually aging, which has raised the demand for medical care. The care of the elderly necessitates ongoing observation. Many wireless medical sensor devices have a wide range of applications to collect information on various physiological changes to monitor the patient’s health status. The data used in these applications have the personal information of the patients, so it must be protected and transmitted with different security requirements. The encryption mechanism must meet the security requirements of various types of data. In this article, we propose an extended design [i.e., lightweight authentication and encryption mechanism in Bluetooth Low Energy (LAEBLE)] based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for the E-health system. We have modified the encryption mechanism and BLE pairing method to mitigate the communication and computation costs and ensure the security of patient data at the same time. In order to improve the encryption time and power consumption, we modify the symmetric encryption algorithm. Besides, we also propose a new asymmetric encryption algorithm to reduce the ciphertext length. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism reduces the number of transmitted packets in the authentication method and consumes less power than the BLE specification.