Protecting Data Confidentiality and Assuring Integrity, and Preventing Rogue Devices in Medical Body Area Network

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a modern technology that connects physical objects in a given environment over the Internet to make their information available from everywhere and at any time. The popularity of IoT technologies is rapidly increasing in most areas, such as education, health, agriculture, transportation, etc. Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) is an emerging healthcare technology that allows remote monitoring of patient's vital signs, providing physicians with real-time data and facilitating better treatment decisions. However, security concerns are one of the hardest things to solve in IoT systems because they have limited computing power, memory, and energy, among other things. Moreover, all the objects in the IoT system are communicated with, controlled, and monitored over the Internet, and most communications are established via wireless networks. Due to the weakness of the wireless network, it is essential to protect data so that a bad guy can't get to it. This article proposes a model based on a lightweight cryptographic protocol to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and device authentication for MBAN patients. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach is functional with the currently available hardware resources to provide complete cryptographic functionalities, like ensuring patient physiological data confidentiality and upholding data integrity during the exchange between sensor devices and the central coordinator. Also, unauthorized access attempts from malicious devices or attackers are detected through mutual authentication to maintain the integrity of data sources.