Internet of Things: Protection of Medical Data through Decentralized Ledgers

It is forecasted that billions of Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor devices will be installed worldwide by 2020. These devices can provide infrastructure-based services for various applications such as in smart hospitals, smart industry, smart grids, and smart industrial towns. Among them, the hospital service system needs to authenticate devices, and medical data are recorded for diagnostic purposes. In general, digital signatures are employed, but the computational power and their huge numbers pose many challenges to the digital signature system. To solve such problems, we developed a ledger system for authenticating IoT medical devices. It is a centralized ledger system architecture for particular authentication purposes only. It uses a very lightweight computational mechanism to authenticate IoT devices and helps secure medical data. We used two phases to analyze the proposed security system. First, we utilized a mathematical model to test its performance. In this phase, we proved that our proposed system cannot generate valid requests and responses for IoT devices without authentication. Second, we utilized a hyperledger to run our proposed system within our test environment to record various performance metrics, particularly the latency required for the security key operation, and message code updates. The analysis shows that our proposed system is secure and highly efficient when dealing with medical data through IoT devices using a centralized ledger system.

Automated summary

The article discusses the installation of billions of Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor devices worldwide by 2020. Among various applications, the hospital service system requires authenticating devices and recording medical data. To address challenges faced by digital signature systems, a ledger system for authenticating IoT medical devices was developed, using a centralized architecture for authentication purposes.