A comprehensive survey of security mechanisms in healthcare applications

Recent trends and the accurate knowledge of human anatomy allow the healthcare professionals to handle the emergency scenario. Remote monitoring of patients by the healthcare professionals or doctors through the utilization of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) offers the solution to the shortage problem. The special form of WSN used for remote monitoring called Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) or Wireless Medical Sensor Network (WMSN) utilizes the numerous sensors that collect the data from the human body and send it to the central device for processing (raising the alarm for anomalies detection) and storage. This paper presents the survey of WMSN topologies, data sharing mechanisms, cryptography and attributes-based encryption in privacy preserving in detail. The survey addresses the issues in cryptographic approaches such as storage / computational overhead, the trade-off between the security and elasticity, trust assurance against the attacks respectively. The detailed survey conveys that the secure data transfer from the user to the server is the major issue against the several inside and outside attackers. The processes involved in cryptography mechanisms such as key generation, encryption, and decryption introduces the storage and computational overheads and delegation issues in data preserving. To overcome these issues, the trusted authority and the hash verifier is included to generate and exchange the keys. Besides, the trade-off between the security and overhead reduction is still investigating the issue in the healthcare applications.