Securing health sensing using integrated circuit metric

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 15; no. 10; pp. 26621 - 26642
• Main Authors: Tahir, Ruhma, Tahir, Hasan, McDonald-Maier, Klaus
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 20.10.2015; MDPI
• Subjects: accelerometer; Accelerometers; Accelerometry; Access control; Algorithms; authentication; Communication; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Security; Confidentiality; Devices; Digital signatures; Equipment Design; Fingerprints; Health; Health care; Humans; ICMetric; Identity theft; Integrated circuits; Medical personnel; Microelectromechanical systems; Patients; Professionals; remote healthcare; secure remote password protocol; Security; Sensors; Symmetry; Telemedicine - instrumentation; Telemedicine - methods; Theft; ICMetric; remote healthcare; secure remote password protocol; accelerometer; confidentiality; authentication
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s151026621

Convergence of technologies from several domains of computing and healthcare have aided in the creation of devices that can help health professionals in monitoring their patients remotely. An increase in networked healthcare devices has resulted in incidents related to data theft, medical identity theft and insurance fraud. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a secure lightweight wearable health sensing system. The proposed system is based on an emerging security technology called Integrated Circuit Metric (ICMetric) that extracts the inherent features of a device to generate a unique device identification. In this paper, we provide details of how the physical characteristics of a health sensor can be used for the generation of hardware "fingerprints". The obtained fingerprints are used to deliver security services like authentication, confidentiality, secure admission and symmetric key generation. The generated symmetric key is used to securely communicate the health records and data of the patient. Based on experimental results and the security analysis of the proposed scheme, it is apparent that the proposed system enables high levels of security for health monitoring in resource optimized manner.