An Efficient Multicast Authenticated Encryption Scheme for Smart Elderly Care Systems

Undoubtedly, smart elderly care systems can leverage Internet of Things (IoT) technology to enhance senior living services by integrating connected devices and sensors. Nevertheless, it is still a challenging issue to achieve secure and efficient multicast group communication among these IoT devices in smart elderly care systems, as IoT devices can dynamically become targets during multicast communication. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a new efficient multicast authenticated encryption scheme, which is characterized by integrating Merkle Tree, prefix encoding, XOR filters, and ASCON techniques to provide a robust solution for secure and personalized eldercare services in IoT-enabled environments. Security analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme can satisfy the confidentiality and integrity requirements. In addition, the performance evaluation confirms that our proposed scheme is computationally efficient.