A Novel Security Framework for Medical Data in IoT Ecosystems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is integrated with the healthcare system to create an intelligent hospital ecosystem. Protecting the privacy and security of medical data is a central problem in such an ecosystem. This article proposes a novel yet simple security framework to ensure the confidentiality of medical data during the communication between IoT hops. The proposed framework utilizes the concept of encryption to ensure the security. It essentially involves inducing confusion among pixels by employing image pixel scrambling achieved by spiralizing the medical data matrix, followed by a diffusion process using matrix exponentials and pseudorandom number generation by sequential chaotic maps. A reliable decryption scheme is finally designed to obtain the original data from the encrypted data. Experimental results and analyzes demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed framework and, thus, making it more suitable for the IoT ecosystem.