Sybil Attack Detection for Secure IoT-Based Smart Healthcare Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the way devices interact and collaborate to accomplish a shared goal. IoT enables the integration of real-time entities through communication, computing, and sensing functions to provide useful services to the general public. This paper discusses the application of IoT in patient health monitoring, specifically utilizing embedded IoT sensors. These devices are placed on patients’ bodies to monitor their health conditions promptly. However, transferring data from mobile devices to the medical system introduces potential security threats. IoT devices can be targeted by various threats, including black holes, gray holes, Sybil attacks, and sinkhole attacks. Among these, Sybil attacks pose particular risks as they involve the theft of legitimate nodes’ identities, leading to information loss, network misinterpretation, and routing disruptions. To address these challenges, a novel approach named SybilGuard is proposed in this paper for detecting Sybil attacks in IoT-based smart healthcare environments. The approach encompasses three primary phases: initialization, encrypted communication, and Sybil detection. Smart health records are encoded using a lightweight encryption scheme and prime order grouping to ensure data confidentiality. In the detection phase, a novel algorithm is employed where the central node records and analyzes anomalous user activities to identify Sybil nodes. The algorithm detects false nodes on a specific path by notifying another node about the attack, thereby preventing the attack and selecting an alternate route for packet forwarding. © The Institution of Engineers (India) 2024.