A ciphertext-policy Attribute based encryption scheme for wireless body area networks based on ECC

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) based healthcare system is one of the prominent approaches to overcome the issue of the increasing burden of healthcare costs in India. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are the key enabler in this scenario. It provides continuous monitoring of the patient’s health condition remotely, by making the real-time health data of the patient available to healthcare professionals through cloud/public channel. On the other side, the practical implementation of this service is not possible if the issue of data security is not considered. Thus, in this paper, we have proposed a secure framework for WBAN using Elliptic Curve Cryptography based Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CPABE) without bilinear pairing operations. The proposed CPABE is secured under Elliptic Curve Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption and also has a feature of user/attribute revocation. We have evaluated the lightweight feature of the proposed CPABE by comparing it with other existing ABE schemes for WBAN. The result shows that our scheme outperforms the existing schemes for WBAN in terms of keys-ciphertext size and computation overhead.