Securing Internet-of-Medical-Things networks using cancellable ECG recognition.

Reinforcement of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) network security has become extremely significant as these networks enable both patients and healthcare providers to communicate with each other by exchanging medical signals, data, and vital reports in a safe way. To ensure the safe transmission of sensitive information, robust and secure access mechanisms are paramount. Vulnerabilities in these networks, particularly at the access points, could expose patients to significant risks. Among the possible security measures, biometric authentication is becoming a more feasible choice, with a focus on leveraging regularly-monitored biomedical signals like Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals due to their unique characteristics. A notable challenge within all biometric authentication systems is the risk of losing original biometric traits, if hackers successfully compromise the biometric template storage space. Current research endorses replacement of the original biometrics used in access control with cancellable templates. These are produced using encryption or non-invertible transformation, which improves security by enabling the biometric templates to be changed in case an unwanted access is detected. This study presents a comprehensive framework for ECG-based recognition with cancellable templates. This framework may be used for accessing IoMT networks. An innovative methodology is introduced through non-invertible modification of ECG signals using blind signal separation and lightweight encryption. The basic idea here depends on the assumption that if the ECG signal and an auxiliary audio signal for the same person are subjected to a separation algorithm, the algorithm will yield two uncorrelated components through the minimization of a correlation cost function. Hence, the obtained outputs from the separation algorithm will be distorted versions of the ECG as well as the audio signals. The distorted versions of the ECG signals can be treated with a lightweight encryption stage and used as cancellable templates. Security enhancement is achieved through the utilization of the lightweight encryption stage based on a user-specific pattern and XOR operation, thereby reducing the processing burden associated with conventional encryption methods. The proposed framework efficacy is demonstrated through its application on the ECG-ID and MIT-BIH datasets, yielding promising results. The experimental evaluation reveals an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 0.134 on the ECG-ID dataset and 0.4 on the MIT-BIH dataset, alongside an exceptionally large Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AROC) of 99.96% for both datasets. These results underscore the framework potential in securing IoMT networks through cancellable biometrics, offering a hybrid security model that combines the strengths of non-invertible transformations and lightweight encryption.

Secure Health Monitoring Communication Systems Based on IoT and Cloud Computing for Medical Emergency Applications.

Smart health surveillance technology has attracted wide attention between patients and professionals or specialists to provide early detection of critical abnormal situations without the need to be in direct contact with the patient. This paper presents a secure smart monitoring portable multivital signal system based on Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology. The implemented system is designed to measure the key health parameters: heart rate (HR), blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), and body temperature, simultaneously. The captured physiological signals are processed and encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm before sending them to the cloud. An ESP8266 integrated unit is used for processing, encryption, and providing connectivity to the cloud over Wi-Fi. On the other side, trusted medical organization servers receive and decrypt the measurements and display the values on the monitoring dashboard for the authorized specialists. The proposed system measurements are compared with a number of commercial medical devices. Results demonstrate that the measurements of the proposed system are within the 95% confidence interval. Moreover, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Mean Relative Error (MRE) for the proposed system are calculated as 1.44, 1.12, and 0.012, respectively, for HR, 1.13, 0.92, and 0.009, respectively, for SpO2, and 0.13, 0.11, and 0.003, respectively, for body temperature. These results demonstrate the high accuracy and reliability of the proposed system.