Minimal Resource Required E-Health System with End-to-End Authenticated Encryption Mechanism
Kyriaki Tsantikidou, Nicolas Sklavos · 2023
Smart health applications provide new services to traditional healthcare structures. They mainly employ the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, which allows different components to communicate via data protocols. Such a protocol is the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). Nevertheless, MQTT does not have any built-in security scheme, thus leaving crucial health data vulnerable to attacks. The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol can be applied on top of MQTT. However, even with the time reduction of TLS 1.3, it adds communication overhead, causing issues to resource-constrained IoT devices. This paper designs a lightweight authenticated encryption system for end-to-end security in Smart Health. The proposed architecture achieves 92.7% area decrease compared to other MQTT-based implementations. The employed cryptographic primitive, Photon-Beetle AEAD, is implemented in a 4-bit structural architecture with resource sharing techniques. The main functions of the algorithm are fused, further achieving resource decrease and a low execution time. The mechanism is employed only on end devices with proper key management schemes. Intermediate components are not required to process the data before transmitting them, thus reducing the computation and communication overhead. Overall, this research is one of the few that focuses on a FPGA-based implementation rather than more high-processing devices for MQTT, better simulating the IoT limitations.