Data access control for named data of health things

Abstract

The internet of health things (IoHT) represents an innovative network concept that significantly improving healthcare. However, security and privacy are the main concerns of IoHT because the transmitted health data is often sensitive data about patients’ health status, which needs to be secured and protected from unauthorized users and any leakage. Named data networking (NDN) is considered the most promising architecture for the future internet that perfectly fits with the requirements of IoHT systems, especially regarding security and privacy. In this paper, we exploit the fundamental features of NDN to design a robust system for IoHT to ensure secure communication and access to health data. This system presents a content access control model, which prevents attackers and unauthorized users from accessing health data, allows only authorized users to access these data, and prevents users from accessing “corrupted” or “fake” content. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism slightly delays the secure retrieval of health data. However, this delay is tolerable since the mechanism protects the health data from unauthorized persons and those who try to inject untrusted data into the network.