On the cybersecurity of m-Health IoT systems with LED bitslice implementation
Abdelrahman Eldosouky, Walid Saad · 2018
The Internet of Things (IoT) will provide a large-scale infrastructure that can support a plethora of new networked services. One critical IoT application pertains to m-Health services which allow monitoring the health status of patients while providing the ability for a rapid response in emergency cases. Connecting healthcare services to the IoT brings forward new security threats and vulnerabilities that can jeopardize the patients' private data. In this paper, a novel security framework for m-Health IoT security is proposed using the concept of moving target defense (MTD). MTD allows the m-Health system to dynamically change its cryptographic keys to increase uncertainty on an attacker and secure the data. In the proposed scheme, the devices update their keys locally to eliminate the risk of revealing new keys while they are being shared with a gateway. A practical implementation is proposed based on bitslicing LED, a lightweight encryption cipher, to improve the performance of decrypting multiple packets at the same time. LED bitsliced implementation was tested on an ARM Cortex-A53 and was shown to consume half of the processor's instructions compared to the conventional implementation. The effect of applying MTD on the number of processor's instructions is evaluated and shown to be bounded.