Resource-Efficient Secure Data Sharing for Information Centric E-Health System Using Fog Computing

Recently, an accelerating number of studies are dedicated to deploying various IoT applications in the information centric network paradigm which has lower system complexity than traditional network architectures. However, such a paradigm poses a number of security challenges especially when it is applied in real-time e-health applications. Firstly, it is difficult to ensure security of sensitive data in such a distributed data caching environment because after the data is published in the form of a packet to the information centric network (ICN), it is no longer controlled by the data publisher. Secondly, in some real-time e-health applications, terminal medical sensors are usually resource-constrained, limiting the direct adoption of expensive cryptographic primitives. In order to address these challenges, a resource-efficient secure data sharing scheme in information centric e-health system is proposed, one that utilizes ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) and adapts it to the above-mentioned system with respect to necessary security requirements. It also exploits computation resources of fog nodes and employs outsourcing cryptography to improve system efficiency.The evaluation demonstrates that the scheme can significantly reduce the computation overheads of the resource-constrained terminal medical devices, and can better support the real-time e-health applications.