Toward privacy preserving in IoT e-health systems: A key escrow identity-based encryption scheme

E-health represents one of the most promising Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Indeed, it enhances the traditional medical services by monitoring periodically patient's health information. Due to the sensitivity of exchanged medical data, strong and efficient security and privacy protocols must be deployed. However, existing privacy preserving approaches either cannot achieve a high level of privacy, or have an important computation and/ or storage overheads. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving e-health system, achieving patient privacy and better meeting the IoT environment requirements. This system includes a new cryptographic scheme called KE-IBE which relies on Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) and resolves its key escrow issue. To prove that the proposed protocol can withstand various known attacks, we perform an informal security analysis. To assess the performance of our proposal, we implement it and expose the experiments simulation results. This evaluation shows that the proposed system is highly efficient in comparison to related approaches found in literature and that it achieves privacy with an acceptable running time.