Development of a portable authentication module for security enhancement in tele-health applications

Abstract

With the modern lifestyle becoming more and more complex and competitive in many aspects, people started to concern more about the privacy. And the confidentiality of medical data is one of the top concerns due to their sensitive nature. However, with challenges coming from high demand for both usability and practicality, the privacy and confidentiality of medical data still remain as a formidable challenge. The objective of this project was to develop encryption modules for improving the security of the tele-health applications.

This project focused on the development of encryption modules for MICAz-based and Android-Arduino-based sensor networks. For MICAz-based sensor networks, a hardware-based encryption module was developed and integrated into existing program for security improvement. For Android-Arduino-based sensor networks, a demo sensor network was developed together with a crypto library for Arduino and crypto class for the Android. The performances of the implemented security solutions were tested based on the time required for the process and the memory footprint.

This report covers about the process of designing, developing and implementing the encryption modules as well as the various wireless security issues and hardware limitations which were taken into consideration. Further works can be done on data integrity verification and secure key distribution using public key cryptography to provide better security in tele-health applications.