LSEA-IOMT: On the Implementation of Lightweight Symmetric Encryption Algorithm for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has made a monumental improvement in patient monitoring, early detection of diseases and treatment methods. This not only enriched the quality of living but also the healthcare cost and errors are minimized. This promising technology has greatly helped the patient and frontline healthcare workers. However, security and privacy breaches are one of the major concerns in IoMT due to wide variety of devices and communication network. The lack of security can affect a patient life since IoMT devices transmit patient data to a cloud-based medical server over insecure channel. Hence, maintaining the privacy and confidentiality becomes an utmost issue worth of further exploration and resolution. Cryptography is one of the primitive technologies which can ensure the confidentiality of a data; however, the complex solutions are not a good choice for resource-constrained IoMT device. Accordingly, we have designed a novel lightweight symmetric encryption algorithm (LSEA) for low-powered IoMT devices. Proposed algorithm uses 8-bit block ciphering technique using two 8-bit secret keys. Physiological parameter such as pulse rate of human body has been considered as one the secret keys while designing the algorithm. Security analysis shows that the algorithm is resilient to known plain text attack and known cipher text attack. LSEA has been tested in Arduino with varying payload. Experimental result depicts that it requires only 1.25 ms time for 16 byte and 7.4 ms for 512 byte data. Proposed algorithm has been compared to AES in a similar experimental environment.