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In recent years, Electronic health records (EHR) has gradually become the mainstream in the healthcare field. However, due to the fact that EHR systems are provided by different vendors, data is dispersed and stored, which leads to the phenomenon of data silos, making medical information too fragmented and bringing some challenges to current medical services. Therefore, in view of the difficulties in sharing EHR between medical institutions, the risk of privacy leakage, and the lack of EHR usage control by patients, an EHR sharing model based on consortium blockchain is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the Interplanetary File System is combined with consortium blockchain, which forms a hybrid storage scheme of EHR, this technology effectively improves data security, privacy protection, and operational efficiency. Secondly, the model combines unidirectional multi-hop conditional proxy re-encryption based on type and identity with distributed key generation technology to achieve secure EHR sharing with fine grained control. At the same time, users are required to link the operation records of EHR, so as to realize the traceability of EHR usage. A dynamic Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm based on reputation and clustering is then proposed to solve the problems of arbitrary master node selection, high latency and low throughput of PBFT, enabling the nodes to reach consensus more efficiently. Finally, the model is analyzed in terms of security and user control, showing that the model is less energy intensive in terms of communication overhead and time consumption, and can effectively achieve secure sharing between medical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exchange of medical images and patient data over the internet has attracted considerable attention in the past decade, driven by advancements in communication and health services. However, transferring confidential data through insecure channels, such as the internet, exposes it to potential manipulations and attacks. To ensure the authenticity of medical images while concealing patient data within them, this paper introduces a high-capacity and reversible fragile watermarking model in which an authentication watermark is initially generated from the cover image and merged with the patient's information, photo, and medical report to form the global watermark. This watermark is subsequently encrypted using the chaotic Chen system technique, enhancing the model's security and ensuring patient data confidentiality. The cover image then undergoes a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and the encrypted watermark is inserted into the frequency coefficients using a new embedding technique. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves great watermarked image quality, with a PSNR exceeding 113 dB and an SSIM close to 1, while maintaining a high embedding capacity of 3 BPP (Bits Per Pixel) and offering perfect reversibility. Furthermore, the proposed model demonstrates high sensitivity to attacks, successfully detecting tampering in all 18 tested attacks, and achieves nearly perfect watermark extraction accuracy, with a Bit Error Rate (BER) of 0.0004%. This high watermark extraction accuracy is crucial in our situation where patient data need to be retrieved from the watermarked images with almost no alteration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of the digital healthcare and the electronic health records (EHR) requires smooth networking infrastructure to access data using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)-based applications. The new HTTP/3 standard should provide performance and security improvements over HTTP/2. The goal of our work was to test the performance of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 in the context of the EHRs. We used 45,000 test FHIR Patient resources downloaded and uploaded using 20, 50, 100 and 200 resources per Bundle, which resulted in 2251, 901, 451 and 226 HTTP GET and POST requests respectively. The first test downloading 20 resources per Bundle showed that HTTP/3 outperformed HTTP/2 in the local (mean request time 16.57 ms ± 7.2 standard deviation [SD]) and in the remote network (71.45 ms ± 43.5 SD) which is almost 3 times faster. In the 50 and 100 resources per Bundle test the HTTP/3 protocol demonstrated again more than two times gain in downloading performance for remote requests with mean request time 91.13 ms ± 34.54 SD and 88.09 ms ± 21.66 SD respectively. Furthermore, HTTP/3 outperformed HTTP/2 in the constructed clinical dataset remote transfer. In the upload tests HTTP/3 showed only a slight gain in performance merely in the remote network. The HTTP/3 protocol is a relatively new development and a major improvement for the worldwide web. This new technology is still missing in the digital health and EHRs. Its use could offer a major performance gain in situations where data is gathered from multiple remote locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's data-driven world, the exponential growth of digital information poses significant challenges in data management. In recent years, the adoption of cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) sharing schemes has yielded numerous advantages like improved accessibility, availability, and enhanced interoperability. However, the centralized nature of cloud storage presents challenges in terms of information storage, privacy protection, and security. Despite several approaches that have been presented to ensure secure deduplication of similar EHRs, the validation of data integrity without a third-party auditor (TPA) remains a persistent task. Because involving a TPA raises concerns about the confidentiality and privacy of crucial healthcare information. To tackle this challenge, a novel cloud storage auditing technique is proposed that incorporates cross-patient block-level deduplication while upholding strong privacy protection, ensuring that EHR is not compromised. Here, we introduced blockchain technology to achieve integrity verification, thus eliminating the need for a TPA by providing a decentralized and transparent mechanism. Additionally, an index for all EHRs has been generated to facilitate block-level duplicate checks and employ a novel strategy to prevent adversaries from acquiring original information saved in the cloud storage. The security of the proposed approach is established against factorization attacks and decrypt exponent attacks. The performance evaluation demonstrates the superior efficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of file authenticator generation, challenge creation, and proof verification to other existing client-side deduplication approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as General Pretrained Transformer (GPT) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), which use transformer model architectures, have significantly advanced artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Recognized for their ability to capture associative relationships between words based on shared context, these models are poised to transform healthcare by improving diagnostic accuracy, tailoring treatment plans, and predicting patient outcomes. However, there are multiple risks and potentially unintended consequences associated with their use in healthcare applications. This study, conducted with 28 participants using a qualitative approach, explores the benefits, shortcomings, and risks of using transformer models in healthcare. It analyses responses to seven open-ended questions using a simplified thematic analysis. Our research reveals seven benefits, including improved operational efficiency, optimized processes and refined clinical documentation. Despite these benefits, there are significant concerns about the introduction of bias, auditability issues and privacy risks. Challenges include the need for specialized expertise, the emergence of ethical dilemmas and the potential reduction in the human element of patient care. For the medical profession, risks include the impact on employment, changes in the patient-doctor dynamic, and the need for extensive training in both system operation and data interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conjunction with pandemics, medical image data are growing exponentially. In some countries, hospitals collect biometric data from patients, such as fingerprints, iris, or faces. This data can be used for things like identity verification and security management. However, this medical data can be easily compromised by hackers. In order to prevent illegal tampering with medical images and invasion of privacy, a new texture fusion medical image encryption (TFMIE) algorithm derived from biometric images is proposed, which can encrypt the image using biometric information for storage or transmission. First, the medical image is decomposed into n-bit-planes by bit-plane decomposition. Secondly, a fusion image is generated by a biometric image with a circular local binary pattern and pixel-weighted average method. The fused image is further decomposed into n bit-planes through bit-plane decomposition and performs XOR operation with the original medical image in reverse order. Following the execution of the XOR operation, a new scrambling and diffusion algorithm based on a one-dimensional fractional trigonometric function (1DFTF) chaotic map is employed to form the cipher image. The experimental results show that compared with the existing methods, the average information entropy value of TFMIE is 7.99, and the average values of NPCR and UACI reach 0.9958 and 0.3346, respectively, which have strong key sensitivity, good robustness, and anti-attack ability. The method is lossless and has high transmission efficiency, which can meet the needs of medical big data encryption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the challenges and potential of creating a nationwide network of health AI assurance laboratories to ensure the safety, effectiveness, and ethical use of AI in healthcare. Topics include the challenges of managing bias and conflicts of interest in AI healthcare models, the difficulty in standardizing testing across diverse healthcare practices, and the regional variation in healthcare practices.

The study aims to (1) investigate current levels of patient acceptance of mHealth in Germany; (2) determine the influencing factors of patients' intention to use, and (3) test the influence of prescription and reimbursement status on patient acceptance. Online survey with 1349 participants, of which 1051 were complete and included for statistical analysis, from a broad cross-section of the German population, addressing both users of mobile health (mHealth) applications and people without prior experience. SEM modeling based on a combination of two theoretical frameworks: the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and Health Protective Behavior Theories were used to assess acceptance. Users of mHealth in Germany are mostly patients between the ages of 30 – 50 with mental health or endocrine conditions. General willingness to use mHealth apps / DiGAs (mHealth apps fully reimbursed by social health insurance) is high at 76%, especially if they are governmentally certified, however only 27% of respondents were willing to pay out of pocket. With the exception of a spike in performance expectancy and data security, DiGAs lack a clear differentiation from mHealth apps. Perceived self-efficacy and performance expectancy are significant predictors of willingness to use digital health interventions; with age, attitude, and e-literacy being key demographic predictors. A key takeaway for regulators, providers of mHealth apps/ DiGAs, and other stakeholders involved in mHealth adoption is the importance of addressing negative beliefs early on, targeted communication around effortless usage of mHealth services across age groups and demographics, and focus on highlighting expected benefits of mHealth app/ DiGA usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petabytes of health data are collected annually across the globe in electronic health records (EHR), including significant information stored as unstructured free text. However, the lack of effective mechanisms to securely share clinical text has inhibited its full utilization. We propose a new method, DataSifterText, to generate partially synthetic clinical free-text that can be safely shared between stakeholders (e.g., clinicians, STEM researchers, engineers, analysts, and healthcare providers), limiting the re-identification risk while providing significantly better utility preservation than suppressing or generalizing sensitive tokens. The method creates partially synthetic free-text data, which inherits the joint population distribution of the original data, and disguises the location of true and obfuscated words. Under certain obfuscation levels, the resulting synthetic text was sufficiently altered with different choices, orders, and frequencies of words compared to the original records. The differences were comparable to machine-generated (fully synthetic) text reported in previous studies. We applied DataSifterText to two medical case studies. In the CDC work injury application, using privacy protection, 60.9-86.5% of the synthetic descriptions belong to the same cluster as the original descriptions, demonstrating better utility preservation than the naïve content suppressing method (45.8-85.7%). In the MIMIC III application, the generated synthetic data maintained over 80% of the original information regarding patients' overall health conditions. The reported DataSifterText statistical obfuscation results indicate that the technique provides sufficient privacy protection (low identification risk) while preserving population-level information (high utility). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unfortunately, many of the diabetes mobile apps have operational and design flaws that are debarring users from maximizing from the self-management paradigm. We, therefore, aim to identify the markers of operational and design flaws of diabetes mobile apps to facilitate a better user-centred design. e crowdsourced negative user review comments (rating score: 1–3) of 47 diabetes mobile apps from the google play store. A total of 781 negative user comments (rating score 1–3) from the apps are coded to identify and categorize the themes relating to the operational and design flaws. The operational and design flaws account for 50.32% of the challenges faced by the unhappy diabetes mobile apps users. Among them, 44.73% have issues with app crashing, 17.3% are concerned about device compatibility that inhibits seamless operations, 9.67% are worried about the problem of data uploading. Poor design is a worry to 19.29% of the users who complain of the crowded user interface, poor data management, poor analytics, difficulty scheduling doctors' appointments, and transferring data. More patients with diabetes can be encouraged to continue using diabetes mobile apps for self-management of diabetes through improved design and a pace-wise software advancement to match the ever-growing enhancements in android operating systems and telecommunication devices. This will help to counter most of the challenges identified in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This systematic review aimed to identify the factors associated with information breaches in healthcare settings. We searched electronic databases, including PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and Wiley, for all publications until March 6, 2022 (no start date restriction) and outlined the eligibility criteria framework using Population, Concept, and Context (PCC). Our search strategies yielded 2,156 results, with nine studies included in the final review. We grouped the factors attributed to data breaches into four categories: organizational, information technology (IT), professionals/employees, and clients/patients. Hospital type, hospital size (more beds), higher operationalexpenses and revenue, higher admissions and discharges, and higher Electronic Medical Record (EMR) use, being at earlier phases of EMR adoption, were associated with higher information breaches. Professional factors such as the type of personnel involved and the hospital area can potentially impact the breaches' frequency and magnitude. Patients' sociodemographic, clinical, and behavioral characteristics, such as gender and educational attainment, appear to influence the perceived breach of confidentiality in healthcare settings. Identifying different factors contributing to health information breaches is crucial to protecting healthcare organizations and patients from the devastating consequences of data breaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For researchers to realize the benefits of real-world data in healthcare requires broader access to patient data than is currently possible given siloed data systems. To facilitate evidence generation, infrastructure must support integrated data collection and sharing enabled by patient consent. Critical to the success of data sharing is to design secured data sharing platforms around patient preferences and expectations. The objective of this review was to characterize patient and public preferences for secured data sharing platforms and incentives to share real-world data for health research. We conducted a scoping review of the data sharing and health informatics literature capturing patient and public values for data sharing platforms and incentivization. We searched Embase and Medline (OVID) databases for primary data studies. Two reviewers participated in study selection and data abstraction. Findings were summarized according to preference frequency within each major theme. The final search produced 253 articles. After screening, 12 articles were included for data extraction. Two studies discussed preferences for data sharing platforms, 7 discussed incentives preferences, and 3 addressed both. We identified considerable variation of patient and public preferences according to preferred consent mechanisms and level of control, willingness to trade off risks and benefits, and the type of incentivization appropriate to offer for participation. This preference variation informs the conditions under which individuals may be willing to engage with secured data sharing platforms to support research. Our findings indicate that platforms will need to be flexible to meet the diverse preferences of users and facilitate uptake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patient Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain valuable clinical data that is useful for medical research and public health inquires. However, patient privacy regulation and improper resource sharing risks limit access to EHR medical data for research and public health purposes. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end security solution that addresses both concerns and facilitates the sharing of patient EHR data over an unsecured third-party server using a leveled homomorphic encryption (LHE) scheme. Time testing for aggregating queries and linear computations was carried out using an HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen 10 server with an Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Processor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: HIV treatment prescription is a complex process. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are a category of health information technologies that can assist clinicians to choose optimal treatments based on clinical trials and expert knowledge. The usability of some CDSSs for HIV treatment would be significantly improved by using the knowledge obtained by treating other patients. This knowledge, however, is mainly contained in patient records, whose usage is restricted due to privacy and confidentiality constraints. Methods: A treatment effectiveness measure, containing valuable information for HIV treatment prescription, was defined and a method to extract this measure from patient records was developed. This method uses an advanced cryptographic technology, known as secure Multiparty Computation (henceforth referred to as MPC), to preserve the privacy of the patient records and the confidentiality of the clinicians' decisions. Findings: Our solution enables to compute an effectiveness measure of an HIV treatment, the average time-to-treatment-failure, while preserving privacy. Experimental results show that our solution, although at proof-of-concept stage, has good efficiency and provides a result to a query within 24 min for a dataset of realistic size. Interpretation: This paper presents a novel and efficient approach HIV clinical decision support systems, that harnesses the potential and insights acquired from treatment data, while preserving the privacy of patient records and the confidentiality of clinician decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The duration of activities performed by healthcare providers are pivotal to Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) models. This study examines the use of a smartphone mobile application technology to record activity times. This study validates the accuracy of activity times recorded on a smartphone mobile application, dTool, compared to observed length of time recordings in the operating room. For analysis, we performed two one-sided tests for the measurements "Case Start" and "Case End". Equivalence bounds were specified in terms of raw mean difference of 1 min (upper) and –1 min (lower). The total number of comparisons in the observer protocol was 72 (32 "case start" patient comparisons and 40 "case end" patient comparisons measured over 45 individual OR cases). Given equivalence bounds of –1.000 and 1.000 (on a raw scale) and an alpha of 0.05, both equivalence tests were significant: provider and third-party observer protocol presented t(40) = 3.228 and p = < 0.001; observer timing protocol presented t(68.68) = 56.762, p = < 0.001. Conclusions: With this novel smartphone technology, a healthcare provider can reliably self-record activity LoT using dTool while providing patient care. Future TDABC studies incorporating this technology will reduce the potential operational barriers to implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upgraded network technology presents an advanced technological platform for telecare medicine information systems (TMIS) for patients. However, TMIS generally suffers various attacks since the information being shared through the insecure channel. Recently, many authentication techniques have been proposed relying on the chaotic map. However, many of these designs are not secure against the known attacks. In spite of the fact that some of the constructions attain low computation overhead, they cannot establish an anonymous communication and many of them fail to ensure forward secrecy. In this work, our aim is to present authentication and key agreement protocol for TMIS utilizing a chaotic map to achieve both security and efficiency. The underlying security assumptions are chaotic theory assumptions. This scheme supports forward secrecy and a secure session is established with just two messages of exchange. Moreover, we present a comparative analysis of related authentication techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standards and validation practices regarding mobile health apps need to be established to ensure their proper use and integration into medical practice. This paper proposes an innovative and integrative approach to examine and compare the quality of a certified health mobile applications set. A double classification framework (verified and perceived quality) is proposed and validated to evaluate the quality of 22 verified health mobile apps, particularly to understand whether these apps provide the service demanded by its users. Evaluation of verified quality was based on a certification public program. To analysis user satisfaction, we used content analysis to examine and extract words and expressions contained in online reviews (1,574 reviews were analyzed). The R language was used to scrape data and to perform all statistical analyses. The results did not confirm a significant relationship between both classifications (p >.05). However, the requirements with the highest degree of compliance ("design and relevance" and "quality and safety") of the app accreditation program were the best rated by the users of the apps in their comments. Reflections derived from this paper represent an important contribution to the knowledge base in the expanding research area of mobile health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile health (M-Health) system is the remote form of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN), which can be used for collecting patient's health data in real-time with mobile devices, and storing it to the network servers. The data can be accessed by doctors to monitor, diagnosed and treat patients through a variety of techniques and technologies. The main advantage of the M-Health system is the ease of time-independent communication from physically distant places that enhances the quality of healthcare services at a reduced cost. Furthermore, to provide faster access to the treatment of patients, an M-Health system can be integrated with the internet of things (IoT) to offer preventive or proactive healthcare services by connecting devices and persons. However, its equally great drawback lies in transmitting and receiving the health information wirelessly through an open wireless medium that offers different security and privacy violation threats. We aim to address such a deficiency, and thus a new scheme called an efficient and provable secure certificate-based combined signature, encryption and signcryption (CBCSES) scheme, has been proposed in this article. The scheme not only obtains encryption and signcryption but also provides encryption or signature model alone when needed. To show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, detailed security analyses, i.e. indistinguishable under adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks (IND-CBCSES-CCA) and unforgeable under adaptive chosen message attacks (EUF-CBCSES-CMA), and the comparisons with relevant existing schemes are carried out. The results obtained authenticate the superiority of our scheme in terms of both computation and communication costs with enhanced security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become a prospective technology for the next generation healthcare services, in which tiny sensors are placed either on the skin or in the body of human to transmit real-time monitored data to the medical service provider (MSP). In order to protect the transmitted data from leakage, forgery or alteration, constructing a secure data transmission scheme for WBANs that achieves confidentiality, authentication and integrity is necessary. Also, in practical application of WBANs, patient and MSP are in different domain networks in general. In this article, we first design a cross-domain certificateless signcryption (CDCS) scheme, then an efficient cross-domain data transmission scheme for WBANs is proposed based on the new CDCS scheme. The data transmission scheme realizes authentication, confidentiality, anonymity, nonrepudiation, integrity, registration security and KSTI security. Compared to present two security schemes for the WBANs based on certificateless signcryption, our designed scheme entitles patient and MSP to use different cryptographic parameter in different domain networks. Moreover, the new scheme has advantages in communication overhead and computation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the issue of rising expenditure of healthcare service and to fulfill the skyrocketing demand for quality healthcare, the electronic medical records (EMR) exchange has become a vital and indispensable solution for healthcare facilities in terms of being able to share medical information among healthcare providers. Hence, EMR exchange was expected to improve the quality of healthcare and reduce the cost of repetitive medical check-ups and unnecessary treatments. However, recent reports affirming EMR data leaks and compromises have ignited major worldwide privacy concerns over the security of the EMR systems. How to effectively diminish patients' concern for EMR privacy has thus become an important issue that healthcare institution managers/stakeholders have to address urgently. This study leverages the power-responsibility equilibrium perspective to investigate the antecedents and consequences of concerns for the EMR exchange. A survey using 391 responses collected from medical centers, regional and district hospitals in Taiwan was used to conduct this study. The results show that government regulations have a positive effect on hospital privacy policies. Furthermore, both government regulations and hospital privacy policy are negatively associated with concern for EMR information privacy. Additional reports gathered from this study also showed that concern for EMR information privacy could result in patients' protective responses including refusal to provide personal health information (PHI), removal of PHI, negative word of mouth, complaining directly to the hospital, or complaining indirectly to third-party organizations. These findings demonstrate the need for healthcare facilities to formulate robust privacy policies in order to alleviate patients' concern for EMR information privacy based on governmental regulations. This regulation is top-priority as the incapability of reducing patients' concern for EMR information privacy may lead to the collapse of the campaign for the full-adoption of EMR or possibly jeopardize the promotion and application of EMR among healthcare facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The smart health medical system is expected to enhance the quality of health care services significantly. These system keeps patients related record and provides the services over the insecure public channel which may cause data security and privacy concerns in a smart health system. On the other hand, ciphertext attribute-based encryption(CP-ABE) provides possible encrypted data security. There are some security flaws in CP-ABE, where the existing access policies are in the cleartext form for accessing encrypted sensitive data. On the other hand, it supports the small attribute universe, which restricts the practical deployments of CP-ABE. Moreover, outsider adversary observed the communication, which also creates a serious threat to CP-ABE model. To overcome security and privacy risk, efficient access control have been designed and devolved for medical services. Although we also demonstrate the security analysis of Zhang et al.'s scheme, which is vulnerable to inefficient security proof and man in the middle attack. In the proposed scheme, we proposed an efficient and security preserve scheme to overcome the weaknesses of Zhang's et al.'s system. The protocol satisfies the attribute values of the medical user with hidden access policies. It has been proved under the standard model, which ensure the security of the protocol. Moreover, performance analysis comparison shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than the existing one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent rise in cybersecurity breaches in healthcare organizations has put patients' privacy at a higher risk of being exposed. Despite this threat and the additional danger posed by such incidents to patients' safety, as well as operational and financial threats to healthcare organizations, very few studies have systematically examined the cybersecurity threats in healthcare. To lay a firm foundation for healthcare organizations and policymakers in better understanding the complexity of the issue of cybersecurity, this study explores the major type of cybersecurity threats for healthcare organizations and explains the roles of the four major players (cyber attackers, cyber defenders, developers, and end-users) in cybersecurity. Finally, the paper discusses a set of recommendations for the policymakers and healthcare organizations to strengthen cybersecurity in their organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An electronic health (e-health) system, such as a medical cyber-physical system, offers a number of benefits (e.g. inform medical diagnosis). There are, however, a number of considerations in the implementation of the medical cyber-physical system, such as the integrity of medical / healthcare data (e.g. manipulated data can result in misdiagnosis). A number of digital signature schemes have been proposed in recent years to mitigate some of these challenges. However, the security of existing signatures is mostly based on conventional difficult mathematical problems, which are known to be insecure against quantum attacks. In this paper, we propose a certificateless signature scheme, based on NTRU lattice. The latter is based on the difficulty of small integer solutions on the NTRU lattice, and is known to be quantum attack resilience. Security analysis and performance evaluations demonstrate that our proposed scheme achieves significantly reduced communication and computation costs in comparison to two other competing quantum resilience schemes, while being quantum attack resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile technologies are capable of offering individual level health care services to users. Mobile Healthcare (m-Healthcare) frameworks, which feature smartphone (SP) utilizations of ubiquitous computing made possible by applying wireless Body Sensor Networks (BSNs), have been introduced recently to provide SP clients with health condition monitoring and access to medical attention when necessary. However, in a vulnerable m-Healthcare framework, clients' personal info and sensitive data can easily be poached by intruders or any malicious party, causing serious security problems and confidentiality issues. In 2013, Lu et al. proposed a mobile-Healthcare emergency framework based on privacy-preserving opportunistic computing (SPOC), claiming that their splendid SPOC construction can opportunistically gather SP resources such as computing power and energy to handle computing-intensive Personal Health Information (PHI) with minimal privacy disclosure during an emergency. To balance between the risk of personal health information exposure and the essential PHI processing and transmission, Lu et al. presented a patient-centric privacy ingress control framework based on an attribute-based ingress control mechanism and a Privacy-Preserving Scalar Product Computation (PPSPC) technique. In spite of the ingenious design, however, Lu et al.'s framework still has some security flaws in such aspects as client anonymity and mutual authentication. In this article, we shall offer an improved version of Lu et al.'s framework with the security weaknesses mended and the computation efficiency further boosted. In addition, we shall also present an enhanced mobile-Healthcare emergency framework using Partial Discrete Logarithm (PDL) which does not only achieve flawless mutual authentication as well as client anonymity but also reduce the computation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus on personal data has merited the EU concerns and attention, resulting in the legislative change regarding privacy and the protection of personal data. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to reform existing measures on the protection of personal data of European Union citizens, with a strong impact on the rights and freedoms of individuals in establishing rules for the processing of personal data. The GDPR considers a special category of personal data, the health data, being these considered as sensitive data and subject to special conditions regarding treatment and access by third parties. This work presents the evolution of the applicability of the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 six months after its application in Portuguese health clinics. The results of the present study are discussed in the light of future literature and work are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data, Medical Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS) are increasingly demanding data security, while cloud storage solves the storage problem of complex medical data. However, it is difficult to realize data security sharing. The decentralization feature of blockchain is helpful to solve the problem that the secure authentication process is highly dependent on the trusted third party and implement data security transmission. In this paper, the blockchain technology is used to describe the security requirements in authentication process, and a network model of MCPS based on blockchain is proposed. Through analysis of medical data storage architecture, it can ensure that data can't be tampered and untrackable. In the security authentication phase, bilinear mapping and intractable problems can be used to solve the security threat in the authentication process of medical data providers and users. It can avoid the credibility problem of the trusted third party, and also can realize the ?thyc=10?>two-way authentication between the hospital and blockchain node. Then, BAN logic is used to analyze security protocols, and formal analysis and comparison of security protocols are also made. The results show that the MCPS based on blockchain not only realizes medical treatment data sharing, but also meet the various security requirements in the security authentication phase. In addition, the storage and computing overhead costs is ideal. Therefore, the proposed scheme is more suitable for secure sharing of medical big data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence of the epidemiological transition towards non-communicable diseases, integrated care approaches are required, not solely focused on medical purposes, but also on a range of essential activities for the maintenance of the individuals' quality of life. In order to allow the exchange of information, these integrated approaches might be supported by digital platforms, which need to provide trustful environments and to guarantee the integrity of the information exchanged. Therefore, together with mechanisms such as authentication, logging or auditing, the definition of access control policies assumes a paramount importance. This article focuses on the development of a parser as a component of a platform to support the care of community-dwelling older adults, the SOCIAL platform, to allow the definition of access control policies and rules using natural languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimizing the workflow of a complex organization such as a hospital is a difficult task. An accurate option is to use a real-time locating system to track locations of both patients and staff. However, privacy regulations forbid hospital management to assess location data of their staff members. In this exploratory work, we propose a secure solution to analyze the joined location data of patients and staff, by means of an innovative cryptographic technique called Secure Multi-Party Computation, in which an additional entity that the staff members can trust, such as a labour union, takes care of the staff data. The hospital, owning location data of patients, and the labour union perform a two-party protocol, in which they securely cluster the staff members by means of the frequency of their patient facing times. We describe the secure solution in detail, and evaluate the performance of our proof-of-concept. This work thus demonstrates the feasibility of secure multi-party clustering in this setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern network technology yields new interface for telecare medicine information systems in short TMIS used for patient's healthcare. This system is used to provide healthcare services to patients at their home. It can be observed, telecare medicine information systems generally suffer several attacks as information being transmitted over a public network. Therefore, various authentication and key agreement schemes are proposed for TMIS to ensure secure and authorized patients communication over given public network. However, most of the schemes fail to achieve essential attributes discussed in this article. Although the key attributes of security and efficiency should be achieved in a common framework. This paper proposes construction of an RSA based authentication scheme for authorized access to healthcare services and achieves desirable key attributes of authentication protocols. Proof of security against polynomial time adversary is given in the random oracle to justify the security of proposed scheme. Communication analysis and computation analysis of proposed scheme indicates that proposed scheme's performance is comparable and having better security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing use of wireless technology in healthcare systems and devices makes these systems particularly open to cyber-based attacks, including denial of service and information theft via sniffing (eaves-dropping) and phishing attacks. Evolving technology enables wireless healthcare systems to communicate over longer ranges, which opens them up to greater numbers of possible threats. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones present a new and evolving attack surface for compromising wireless healthcare systems. An enumeration of the types of wireless attacks capable via drones are presented, including two new types of cyber threats: a stepping stone attack and a cloud-enabled attack. A real UAV is developed to test and demonstrate the vulnerabilities of healthcare systems to this new threat vector. The UAV successfully attacked a simulated smart hospital environment and also a small collection of wearable healthcare sensors. Compromise of wearable or implanted medical devices can lead to increased morbidity and mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain in healthcare applications requires robust security and privacy mechanism for high-level authentication, interoperability and medical records sharing to comply with the strict legal requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Blockchain technology in the healthcare industry has received considerable research attention in recent years. This study conducts a review to substantially analyse and map the research landscape of current technologies, mainly the use of blockchain in healthcare applications, into a coherent taxonomy. The present study systematically searches all relevant research articles on blockchain in healthcare applications in three accessible databases, namely, ScienceDirect, IEEE and Web of Science, by using the defined keywords 'blockchain', 'healthcare' and 'electronic health records' and their variations. The final set of collected articles related to the use of blockchain in healthcare application is divided into three categories. The first category includes articles (i.e. 43/58 scientific articles) that attempted to develop and design healthcare applications integrating blockchain, particularly those on new architecture, system designs, framework, scheme, model, platform, approach, protocol and algorithm. The second category includes studies (i.e., 6/58 scientific articles) that attempted to evaluate and analyse the adoption of blockchain in the healthcare system. Finally, the third category comprises review and survey articles (i.e., 6/58 scientific articles) related to the integration of blockchain into healthcare applications. The final articles for review are discussed on the basis of five aspects: (1) year of publication, (2) nationality of authors, (3) publishing house or journal, (4) purpose of using blockchain in health applications and the corresponding contributions and (5) problem types and proposed solutions. Additionally, this study provides identified motivations, open challenges and recommendations on the use of blockchain in healthcare applications. The current research contributes to the literature by providing a detailed review of feasible alternatives and identifying the research gaps. Accordingly, researchers and developers are provided with appealing opportunities to further develop decentralised healthcare applications through a comprehensive discussion of about the importance of blockchain and its integration into various healthcare applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile Edge-Cloud Network is a new network structure after fog-cloud computing, where service and data computing are scattered in the most logical, nearby and efficient place. It provides better services than fog-cloud computing with better performance in reasonably low cost way and allows users to eliminate numerous limitations inherent in fog-cloud computing, although it inherits those security-privacy issues from fog-cloud computing. A novel privacy-preserving mutual authentication in TMIS for mobile Edge-Cloud architecture (abbreviated to NPMA) is constructed in this paper. NPMA scheme not only mitigates some weaknesses of fog-cloud computing, but has other advantages. First, NPMA scheme supports patients(edge-servers) anonymity and forward-backward untraceability (traceability, when needed), since their identities are hidden in two distinct dynamic anonyms and a static one and only the trusted center can recover their real identities, when needed. Second, each edge-server shares a secret value, which realizes authentication with extremely low computional cost in authentication phase. Finally, NPMA scheme is proven safely against passive and active attacks under elliptic curve computable Diffie-Hellman problem (ECDHP) assumption in random oracle model. Hence, it achieves the required security properties and outperforms prior approaches in terms of energy and computational costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to lack of a central bureaucrat in mobile ad hoc networks, the security of the network becomes serious issue. During malicious attacks, according to the motivation of intruder the severity of the threat varies. It may lead to loss of data, energy or throughput. This paper proposes a lightweight Intruder Node Detection and Isolation Action mechanism (INDIA) using feature extraction, feature optimization and classification techniques. The indirect and direct trust features are extracted from each node and the total trust feature is computed by combining them. The trust features are extracted from each node of MANET and these features are optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm as feature optimization technique. These optimized feature sets are then classified using Neural Networks (NN) classifier which identifies the intruder node. The performance of the proposed methodology is studied in terms of various parameters such as success rate in packet delivery, delay in communication and the amount of energy consumption for identifying and isolating the intruder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud-based Personal Health Record (PHR) in the electronic and information system has become next generation cloud platform for facilitating efficient, secure and scalable data access to foster the collaborative care. Data owner prefers to outsource their confidential electronic data to the cloud for effective retrieval and storage without provoking the depletion or losses due to data management and maintenance. Secure data sharing and searching are vital. Be that as it may, secure search for the outsourced data is a formidable errand, which may easily incur the leakage of sensitive personal information. In this research, we propose a novel diversified access control framework composed of User Usage Based Encryption (UUBE) which is normally based on the searchable encryption scheme. In the UUBE demonstrate, Usage is mapped as credential/accreditation with time allotment to each event, where the event is considered as security trait or a privacy attribute. Data user/client can decipher an event if and only if there is a match between the accreditation and credential related to the event. A searchable encryption enables efficient routing of encrypted events using data or feature extraction algorithm as an important technique. Multicredential routing is modelled as an event dissemination strategy to strengthen weak data user confidentiality. The data user is permitted to maintain the accreditations/credentials as per their usage category. Private keys are assigned to the user/client as labels with the accreditations or credentials. A data owner/proprietor associates and relates each enciphered event with a set of credentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryptography is not only a science of applying complex mathematics and logic to design strong methods to hide data called as encryption, but also to retrieve the original data back, called decryption. The purpose of cryptography is to transmit a message between a sender and receiver such that an eavesdropper is unable to comprehend it. To accomplish this, not only we need a strong algorithm, but a strong key and a strong concept for encryption and decryption process. We have introduced a concept of DNA Deep Learning Cryptography which is defined as a technique of concealing data in terms of DNA sequence and deep learning. In the cryptographic technique, each alphabet of a letter is converted into a different combination of the four bases, namely; Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G) and Thymine (T), which make up the human deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Actual implementations with the DNA don't exceed laboratory level and are expensive. To bring DNA computing on a digital level, easy and effective algorithms are proposed in this paper. In proposed work we have introduced firstly, a method and its implementation for key generation based on the theory of natural selection using Genetic Algorithm with Needleman-Wunsch (NW) algorithm and Secondly, a method for implementation of encryption and decryption based on DNA computing using biological operations Transcription, Translation, DNA Sequencing and Deep Learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, a new protective design compatible with existing non-secure systems was proposed, since it is focused on the secure communication of wireless IMD systems in all transmissions. This new protector is an external wearable device and appears to be a belt fitted around for the patients IMD implanted. However, in order to provide effective full duplex transmissions and physical layer security, some sophisticated transceiver antennas have been placed on the belt. In this approach, beam-focused multi-antennas in optimal positions on the belt are randomly switched when transmissions to the IMD are performed and multi-jammer switching with MRC combining or majority-rule based receiving techniques are applied when transmissions from the IMD are carried out. This approach can also reduce the power consumption of the IMDs and contribute to the prolongation of the IMD's battery life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The patient data confidentiality is one of the vital security aspects in e-Health and m-Health services. In particular, providing confidentiality to the patient's medical image is essential and the protection approaches have to be explored in-depth due to the rapid progress in the technologies of teleradiology and PACS. In this study, the pseudo random number generators (PRNGs), namely, the linear congruential generator (LCG) and XOR shift generator (XSG) are improved and combined with improved logistic 2D coupled chaotic map to provide enhanced chaos based encryption. The proposed scheme encrypts the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) images to protect the patient confidentiality during the storage and transfer in radiological information system (RIS). The cipher image was measured with various security analyses and tested with different test suites to prove its randomness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The privacy of patients and the security of their information is the most imperative barrier to entry when considering the adoption of electronic health records in the healthcare industry. Considering current legal regulations, this review seeks to analyze and discuss prominent security techniques for healthcare organizations seeking to adopt a secure electronic health records system. Additionally, the researchers sought to establish a foundation for further research for security in the healthcare industry. The researchers utilized the Texas State University Library to gain access to three online databases: PubMed (MEDLINE), CINAHL, and ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health Source. These sources were used to conduct searches on literature concerning security of electronic health records containing several inclusion and exclusion criteria. Researchers collected and analyzed 25 journals and reviews discussing security of electronic health records, 20 of which mentioned specific security methods and techniques. The most frequently mentioned security measures and techniques are categorized into three themes: administrative, physical, and technical safeguards. The sensitive nature of the information contained within electronic health records has prompted the need for advanced security techniques that are able to put these worries at ease. It is imperative for security techniques to cover the vast threats that are present across the three pillars of healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wireless sensor network(WSN) security is a major issue. There are several network security schemes proposed in research. In the network, malicious nodes obstruct the performance of the network. The network can be vulnerable by Sybil attack. When a node illicitly assertions multiple identities or claims fake IDs, the WSN grieves from an attack named Sybil attack. This attack threatens wireless sensor network in data aggregation, synchronizing system, routing, fair resource allocation and misbehavior detection. Henceforth, the research is carried out to prevent the Sybil attack and increase the performance of the network. This paper presents the novel security mechanism and Fujisaki Okamoto algorithm and also application of the work. The Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) algorithm is ID based cryptographic scheme and gives strong authentication against Sybil attack. By using Network simulator2 (NS2) the scheme is simulated. In this proposed scheme broadcasting key, time taken for different key sizes, energy consumption, Packet delivery ratio, Throughput were analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a network coded cooperative communication (NC-CC) enabled wireless hospital sensor network architecture for monitoring health as well as postural activities of a patient. A wearable device, referred as a smartband is interfaced with pulse rate, body temperature sensors and an accelerometer along with wireless protocol services, such as Bluetooth and Radio-Frequency transceiver and Wi-Fi. The energy efficiency of wearable device is improved by embedding a linear acceleration based transmission duty cycling algorithm (NC-DRDC). The real-time demonstration is carried-out in a hospital environment to evaluate the performance characteristics, such as power spectral density, energy consumption, signal to noise ratio, packet delivery ratio and transmission offset. The resource sharing and energy efficiency features of network coding technique are improved by proposing an algorithm referred as network coding based dynamic retransmit/rebroadcast decision control (LA-TDC). From the experimental results, it is observed that the proposed LA-TDC algorithm reduces network traffic and end-to-end delay by an average of 27.8% and 21.6%, respectively than traditional network coded wireless transmission. The wireless architecture is deployed in a hospital environment and results are then successfully validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSN) comprise of distributed sensors, which can sense human physiological signs and monitor the health condition of the patient. It is observed that providing privacy to the patient's data is an important issue and can be challenging. The information passing is done via the public channel in WMSN. Thus, the patient, sensitive information can be obtained by eavesdropping or by unauthorized use of handheld devices which the health professionals use in monitoring the patient. Therefore, there is an essential need of restricting the unauthorized access to the patient's medical information. Hence, the efficient authentication scheme for the healthcare applications is needed to preserve the privacy of the patients' vital signs. To ensure secure and authorized communication in WMSN, we design a symmetric key based authentication protocol for WMSN environment. The proposed protocol uses only computationally efficient operations to achieve lightweight attribute. We analyze the security of the proposed protocol. We use a formal security proof algorithm to show the scheme security against known attacks. We also use the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulator to show protocol secure against man-in-the-middle attack and replay attack. Additionally, we adopt an informal analysis to discuss the key attributes of the proposed scheme. From the formal proof of security, we can see that an attacker has a negligible probability of breaking the protocol security. AVISPA simulator also demonstrates the proposed scheme security against active attacks, namely, man-in-the-middle attack and replay attack. Additionally, through the comparison of computational efficiency and security attributes with several recent results, proposed scheme seems to be battered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the traditional medical system, telecare medicine information system (TMIS) ensures that patients can get health-care services via the Internet at home. Authenticated key agreement protocol is very important for protecting the security in TMIS. Recently scholars have proposed a lot of authenticated key agreement protocols. In 2016, Chiou et al. demonstrated that Chen et al.'s authentication scheme fails to provide user's anonymity and message authentication and then proposed an enhanced scheme (Chiou et al., J. Med. Syst. 40(4):1-15, 2006) to overcome these drawbacks. In this paper, we demonstrate that Chiou et al.'s scheme is defenseless against key compromise impersonation (KCI) attack and also fails to provide forward security. Moreover, we propose a novel authentication scheme namely ICASME to overcome the mentioned weaknesses in this paper. Security analyses show that ICASME achieves the forward security and KCI attack resistance. In addition, it is proved that the time taken to implement the ICASME is not intolerable compared to the original protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical data are often maintained by different organizations. However, detailed analyses sometimes require these datasets to be integrated without violating patient or commercial privacy. Multiparty Private Set Intersection (MPSI), which is an important privacy-preserving protocol, computes an intersection of multiple private datasets. This approach ensures that only designated parties can identify the intersection. In this paper, we propose a practical MPSI that satisfies the following requirements: The size of the datasets maintained by the different parties is independent of the others, and the computational complexity of the dataset held by each party is independent of the number of parties. Our MPSI is based on the use of an outsourcing provider, who has no knowledge of the data inputs or outputs. This reduces the computational complexity. The performance of the proposed MPSI is evaluated by implementing a prototype on a virtual private network to enable parallel computation in multiple threads. Our protocol is confirmed to be more efficient than comparable existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless body area network (WBAN) provide a mechanism of transmitting a persons physiological data to application providers e.g. hospital. Given the limited range of connectivity associated with WBAN, an intermediate portable device e.g. smartphone, placed within WBAN's connectivity, forwards the data to a remote server. This data, if not protected from an unauthorized access and modification may be lead to poor diagnosis. In order to ensure security and privacy between WBAN and a server at the application provider, several authentication schemes have been proposed. Recently, Wang and Zhang proposed an authentication scheme for WBAN using bilinear pairing. However, in their scheme, an application provider could easily impersonate a client. In order to overcome this weakness, we propose an efficient remote authentication scheme for WBAN. In terms of performance, our scheme can not only provide a malicious insider security, but also reduce running time of WBAN (client) by 51 % as compared to Wang and Zhang scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many countries have been trying to integrate electronic health data managed by each hospital to offer more efficient healthcare services. Since health data contain sensitive information of patients, there have been much research that present privacy preserving mechanisms. However, existing studies either require a patient to perform various steps to secure the data or restrict the patient to exerting control over the data. In this paper, we propose patient-controlled attribute-based encryption, which enables a patient (a data owner) to control access to the health data and reduces the operational burden for the patient, simultaneously. With our method, the patient has powerful control capability of his/her own health data in that he/she has the final say on the access with time limitation. In addition, our scheme provides emergency medical services which allow the emergency staffs to access the health data without the patient's permission only in the case of emergencies. We prove that our scheme is secure under cryptographic assumptions and analyze its efficiency from the patient's perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a great divide between rural and urban areas, particularly in medical emergency care. Although medical best practice guidelines exist and are in hospital handbooks, they are often lengthy and difficult to apply clinically. The challenges are exaggerated for doctors in rural areas and emergency medical technicians (EMT) during patient transport. In this paper, we propose the concept of distributed executable medical best practice guidance systems to assist adherence to best practice from the time that a patient first presents at a rural hospital, through diagnosis and ambulance transfer to arrival and treatment at a regional tertiary hospital center. We codify complex medical knowledge in the form of simplified distributed executable disease automata, from the thin automata at rural hospitals to the rich automata in the regional center hospitals. However, a main challenge is how to efficiently and safely synchronize distributed best practice models as the communication among medical facilities, devices, and professionals generates a large number of messages. This complex problem of patient diagnosis and transport from rural to center facility is also fraught with many uncertainties and changes resulting in a high degree of dynamism. A critically ill patient's medical conditions can change abruptly in addition to changes in the wireless bandwidth during the ambulance transfer. Such dynamics have yet to be addressed in existing literature on telemedicine. To address this situation, we propose a pathophysiological model-driven message exchange communication architecture that ensures the real-time and dynamic requirements of synchronization among distributed emergency best practice models are met in a reliable and safe manner. Taking the signs, symptoms, and progress of stroke patients transported across a geographically distributed healthcare network as the motivating use case, we implement our communication system and apply it to our developed best practice automata using laboratory simulations. Our proof-of-concept experiments shows there is potential for the use of our system in a wide variety of domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays people can get many services including health-care services from distributed information systems remotely via public network. By considering that these systems are built on public network, they are vulnerable to many malicious attacks. Hence it is necessary to introduce an effective mechanism to protect both users and severs. Recently many two-factor authentication schemes have been proposed to achieve this goal. In 2016, Li et al. demonstrated that Lee et al.'s scheme was not satisfactory to be deployed in practice because of its security weaknesses and then proposed a security enhanced scheme to overcome these drawbacks. In this paper, we analyze Li et al.'s scheme is still not satisfactory to be applied in telecare medicine information systems (TMIS) because it fails to withstand off-line dictionary attack and known session-specific temporary information attack. Moreover, their scheme cannot provide card revocation services for lost smart card. In order to solve these security problems, we propose an improved scheme. Then we analyze our scheme by using BAN-logic model and compare the improved scheme with related schemes to prove that our scheme is advantageous to be applied in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prosperity of e-health is boosted by fast development of medical devices with wireless communications capability such as wearable devices, tiny sensors, monitoring equipments, etc., which are randomly distributed in clinic environments. The drastically-increasing population of such devices imposes new challenges on the limited wireless resources. To relieve this problem, key knowledge needs to be extracted from massive connection attempts dispersed in the air towards efficient access control. In this paper, a hybrid periodic-random massive access (HPRMA) scheme for wireless clinical networks employing ultra-narrow band (UNB) techniques is proposed. In particular, the proposed scheme towards accommodating a large population of devices include the following new features. On one hand, it can dynamically adjust the resource allocated for coexisting periodic and random services based on the traffic load learned from signal collision status. On the other hand, the resource allocation within periodic services is thoroughly designed to simultaneously align with the timing requests of differentiated services. Abundant simulation results are also presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HPRMA scheme over baseline schemes including time-division multiple access (TDMA) and random access approach, in terms of channel utilization efficiency, packet drop ratio, etc., for the support of massive devices' services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security and privacy are the first and foremost concerns that should be given special attention when dealing with Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). As WBAN sensors operate in an unattended environment and carry critical patient health information, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one of the major attacks in WBAN environment that not only exhausts the available resources but also influence the reliability of information being transmitted. This research work is an extension of our previous work in which a machine learning based attack detection algorithm is proposed to detect DDoS attack in WBAN environment. However, in order to avoid complexity, no consideration was given to the traceback mechanism. During traceback, the challenge lies in reconstructing the attack path leading to identify the attack source. Among existing traceback techniques, Probabilistic Packet Marking (PPM) approach is the most commonly used technique in conventional IP- based networks. However, since marking probability assignment has significant effect on both the convergence time and performance of a scheme, it is not directly applicable in WBAN environment due to high convergence time and overhead on intermediate nodes. Therefore, in this paper we have proposed a new scheme called Efficient Traceback Technique (ETT) based on Dynamic Probability Packet Marking (DPPM) approach and uses MAC header in place of IP header. Instead of using fixed marking probability, the proposed scheme uses variable marking probability based on the number of hops travelled by a packet to reach the target node. Finally, path reconstruction algorithms are proposed to traceback an attacker. Evaluation and simulation results indicate that the proposed solution outperforms fixed PPM in terms of convergence time and computational overhead on nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To enhance the quality of healthcare in the management of chronic disease, telecare medical information systems have increasingly been used. Very recently, Zhang and Qi ( J. Med. Syst. 38(5):47, ), and Zhao ( J. Med. Syst. 38(5):46, ) separately proposed two authentication schemes for telecare medical information systems using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. They claimed that their protocols achieve all security requirements including forward secrecy. However, this paper demonstrates that both Zhang and Qi's scheme, and Zhao's scheme could not provide forward secrecy. To augment the security, we propose an efficient RFID authentication scheme using elliptic curves for healthcare environments. The proposed RFID scheme is secure under common random oracle model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]