Secrecy aware key management scheme for Internet of Healthcare Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an essential aspect of digital healthcare information; the goal is to monitor various health parameters regularly to make healthcare management more efficient and convenient. Gateway devices can broadcast/multicast messages securely to sensors or intended recipients to guarantee the confidentiality of medical readings in the healthcare environment utilizing IoT sensors. In this context, designing and executing a key management framework is critical for the healthcare environment, and working with limited computing and processing capacities is also challenging. The literature on IoT key management is inclined toward centralized solutions, provides solutions with heavy computation and communication costs, and partially addresses resource-constrained devices that guarantee forward and backward secrecy in the healthcare domain. This paper constructs a group key management scheme with node joining and leaving scenarios to provide forward and backward secrecy focusing on lightweight computation. We use the concept of one-way accumulation for secret message exchange by combining elliptic curve cryptography. We designed a scheme that refreshed the established group key as the group's size grows or shrinks, and the approach also applies to classical ciphers conveniently for the number of message exchanges for healthcare nodes. To demonstrate innovation in our method, we mathematically proved the soundness of our session key management scheme for the network model, and simulation findings show that the method is feasible as the processing and communication costs are reduced compared to related schemes.